l^^oxcP^^ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/feministturninsoOOnoch The Feminist Turn in the Social History of Art Linda Nochlin Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith Art History Oral Documentation Project Compiled under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities Copyright©2000 The J. Paul Getty Trust COPYRIGHT LAW The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to fijmish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW None. LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Assistant Director for Resource Collections of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Frontispiece: Linda Nochlin. Photograph by Matthew Begun, courtesy of Linda Nochlin. CONTENTS Curriculum Vitae x SESSION ONE: 15 APRIL, 1998 (165 minutes) TAPE 1, SIDE ONE 1 Parents and family background — Growing up privileged and comfortable in Brooklyn — Family left-wing but wealthy — Literature and the arts of primary importance in the family — Close relationship with grandparents and other relatives — Education at Brooklyn Ethical Culture School — Maternal grandfather wanted her to study literature and become a writer — Childhood poem on the world of the past as discovered in the Brooklyn Museum — Days spent at the Cloisters and other museums — On her artistic, dashing father — Mother's love of dance, music, and literature — Mother read to her from James Joyce — Joining a poetry-writing group in high school — Art classes — Love for Picasso and modern French art — Raised to be a self-sufficient, independent thinker — Standard cultural pressures still operating: desire for popularity, getting married young, and having a large family — Dance lessons with Hanya Holm — Musical tastes — Participating in the folk scene in New York City — Hanging out in Greenwich Village as a teenager — Choosing Vassar — Exposed there to a much broader but less attractive world — Jackie Bouvier one of her classmates — Finding circles of left-wing, independent thinking women — Working as editor of the literary magazine — Compulsory dating practices at Vassar — Continuing pressures to plan for marriage. TAPE 1, SIDE TWO 20 Mixed messages at Vassar about careers and marriage — Paper for psychology class found dichotomy in women's magazine's: non-fiction sections praised professionalism, while fiction stressed domesticity — Desire to be a poet — Marriage, after graduation, to Philip Nochlin, a philosophy professor at Vassar — One year's study in seventeenth- century English literature at Columbia earns her an MA. and a job in the art history department at Vassar — Agnes Claflin, Nochlin's key IV mentor at Vassar — Enrolls in Ph.D. program at the Institute of Fine Arts while teaching and mothering her first child — Developing her approach to art history courses — Teaching Art 105, the survey class — Reading Sigmund Freud and Wolfgang Kohler as an undergraduate — Love of dance and choreography — On Susanne Langer and John Dewey — Women able to run the show at Vassar but not elsewhere — Developing a strong, silent persona while teaching at Vassar — Her first husband died from asthma when she was 29 — Sharing domestic responsibilities with her second husband — On Meyer Schapiro and Columbia University — Classes with H. W. Janson at the Institute of Fine Arts — Developing friends in the New York art world while curating shows at Vassar — Janson's active role in finding jobs for women in art history — More on courses at the Institute — Robert Goldwater — Strong influence of Karl Lehmann — Temptation to delve into antique art — Formalist and iconographic training — Seminar with Walter Friedlaender — Studies in architectural history with Richard Krautheimer and Wolfgang Lotz — Reading Reyner Banham and Siegfried Giedion — Her oral examination — On Agnes Claflin's teaching style. TAPE II, SIDE ONE 41 More on Claflin as teacher and mentor — Impact of Claflin's refusal to make easy generalizations — Adolf Katzenellenbogen and Krautheimer as teachers — The art of personal interpretation — Krautheimer's charisma — More on Lotz and Lehmann — More on Schapiro's influence — Courbet's relation to popular art — Using work of Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris on the myth of the artist to frame her project — Readings in social history of art and the Frankfurt School — The importance of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex — Developing her dissertation on Courbet in order to combine her interest in radical politics and artistic innovation — Fulbright year in France in 1958 while husband had a philosophy fellowship in England — Wrote a novel entitled Art and Life while writing her dissertation — Portion of the novel published in 1963 as a study of the Isenheim altarpiece — Influence of Andre Gide on her thinking — Admiration for Nathalie Sarraute — Friends in France — Network of friends at the Institute — Meeting her second husband, Richard Pommer, at Vassar — On Warburgian analysis — Approaches to method and theory — Andre Malraux's influence — Nochlin's training in analytic philosophy has guided her work throughout her career — Prefers to work in synchronic areas — On her theory of history — Different historical situations demand different theoretical approaches — Rejection of totalizing approaches to history; preference for Claude Levi-Strauss's and Clfford Geertz's notions of bricolage — Influence of Gaston Bachelard and Jean Piaget in Nochlin's work on Courbet — Sharing ideas and work in progress with Richard Pommer — Assessing strengths and weaknesses of her work on Courbet — Decision not to publish her dissertation as a book — Janson's commissioning her to prepare Sources and Documents a critical turning point in her professional life — Writing Realism — Friendship with Philip Pearlstein and other New York artists. TAPE II, SIDE TWO 61 Development of friendships with women artists — Vassar's tradition of supporting and collecting women artists — Appreciation at Vassar for a tradition of women's art extending back into the nineteenth century — Joan Mitchell — Effects of McCarthy period on Vassar and on family — One uncle left the United States to live in England — Response to Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique — The rebirth of the women's movement — Mary McCarthy's The Group — Viewing feminine, domestic women as the enemy — Marriage not to be equated with conventional domesticity. SESSION TWO: 16 APRIL, 1998 (100 minutes) TAPE III, SIDE ONE 67 Discusses the limitations of being interviewed by a man — On transference processes — Differences in her attitudes towards male and female colleagues — Nochlin's interest in fashion — Recalls magazine she created at Brooklyn Ethical Culture School dedicated to fashion — A handmade book on the history of fashion from the Egyptians to the famous designers of the 1940s — Favorite contemporary designers — Changing ideas about fashion — Insides and outsides — Favorite places to shop — Decision to let hair go gray — Friends all involved in arts and letters — Lack of employment VI opportunities for women faculty outside of women's colleges — Co-ed schools were co-ed in student body only, not in faculty — Lack of childcare — Vassar an island of encouragement in a world largely hostile to professional women — Women in the College Art Association — Awakening in 1960 to necessity of radical feminism — Writing "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" — Constraints of being completely absorbed in one's work and being overly worried about doing it well at the same time — On theory — Sexual mores at Vassar — On abortion before Roe v. Wade — Nochlin's two illegal abortions — Initial objections to Vassar going co-ed — Reasons for move to City University of New York [CUNY] — Effects of antiwar and black power movements on student-faculty relationships at Vassar — Brief stint at Columbia after '68 revolt. TAPE 111, SIDE TWO 87 More on political activism — Necessity to maintain certain barriers between student and teacher — "Otherness" as a strategy in her critical thinking — Anger and diplomacy — Work on nudes as a genre — Importance of Erving Goflfman to her analysis — On Goflfman's book Gender Advertisements — On representations of women in Daumier and Delacroix — More on background of "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" — Participation in women's consciousness- raising groups — Importance of her '72 Courtauld lecture on women artists for students like Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker — Reading Althusser — On interpellation — On feminist art of the 1970s — The politics of pleasure — On essentialism and its appeal to feminists in the 1970s — Admiration for D. H. Lawrence despite his contradictory stances towards women — On responses to "Women Artists, 1550-1950." TAPE IV, SIDE ONE 107 On her advisory role with New York City museums — Interests in younger artists — Work on representations of Jews in art — Work on the pageant movement and the Paterson Strike pageant — - More on move from Vassar to CUNY Graduate Center in 1971. Vll SESSION THREE: 14 MAY, 1998 (128 minutes) TAPE V, SIDE ONE 112 Recent work on representations of the horse in nineteenth-century art — Images of older women — Her personal enjoyment of senior status not matched by any available images — The failure of feminism to understand aging — Assessing the most positive aspects of her life — Thoughts on the trajectory of her career — Always knew she was exceptional — Teaching the master's level course at Hunter College in the 1960s — Learning a new way of thinking about art history from artists — More on joining the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center — Mihon Brown — The best years of her academic career spent at CUNY — Developing friendships with Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Hal Foster, and others — The CUNY approach to art history and what set it off from other east coast schools — Teaching at Yale — Progress in establishment of a variety of gender- based approaches to art history — Her work is most successful when it combines formal criticism with social history of art — Feminism laid groundwork for introduction of other social issues into the field of art history — Defining the publics she hoped would be interested in her work — On writing and rewriting — Worries about apolitical climate today and the marginalization of social protest movements. TAPE V, SIDE TWO 130 More on women mentors — Elizabeth Anscombe — On Situationism and its appeal for art historians in the 1970s — Development of "Buy My Bananas" — Deconstructing who owns the languages of eroticism — Work on the pageant movement spurred by reading feminist memoirs from the early twentieth century — Shift of interest from social movements to critique of individual masterworks — On discussing work in progress with colleagues — More on studies of Jewish issues in art history — On Edward Said, and Nochlin's essay on Orientalist French art — Work on Seurat's Poseuses — Discusses differences between working in France and in the United States — French approaches to nineteenth-century art — On French feminist theory — Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray — Vlll Comments on her interest and participation in October. TAPE VI, SIDE ONE 148 On her articles for other journals — How she chooses her publishers — Favorite editors — Her closest friends — On the special sense of happiness she gets from being with other independent women — On defensive and competitive stance of some older male colleagues — Nochlin's terror of becoming an icon for feminism — Being a mind object could be worse than being a sex object — On her service as a member of the visiting committee at the Harvard fine arts department — Fight over the public programs of the Fogg Museum — Joy of teaching with Richard Sennett — Thoughts on the ideal art history department. Index 160 Richard Candida Smith, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, interviewed Linda Nochlin at her home in New Yori< City (Tapes I,II) and in her office at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York City (Tapes III-Vl). A total of 6.55 hours were recorded. The transcript was edited by Katherine P. Smith. IX CURRICULUM VITAE LINDA NOCHLIN Born: January 30, 193 1, Brooklyn, New York FAMILY: Husband: Philip Nochlin (deceased) Richard Pommer (deceased) Children: Jessica Ruth Nochlin (Trotta), b. August 5, 1955 Daisy Pommer, b. May 8, 1969 PRESENT POSITION: Lila Acheson Wallace Professr of Modem Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York City EDUCATION: 1951 B.A. (Philosophy), Vassar College 1952 MA. (English), Columbia University 1963 Ph.D. (Art History), New York University, Institute of Fine Arts SUB.TECT OF DISSERTATION: "The Development and Nature of Realism in the Work of Gustave Courbet." FELLOWSHIPS HELD: 1958-59 Fulbright fellow 1962-63 Fels fellow 1972-73 American Council of Learned Societies fellow 1977-78 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Professionai. Career: 1952-63 Instructor, Vassar College 1963-66 Assistant Professor, Vassar College 1 966-69 Associate Professor, Vassar College 1969-71 Professor, Vassar College 1971-79 Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art History, Vassar College 1980-90 Distinguished Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center 1990-92 Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art, Yale University 1992- Professor of Modern Art, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts Visitng Professorships: 1967-68 Visiting Professor, Columbia University 1970 Visiting Professor, Hunter College, N.Y.C. 1971 Visiting Professor, Stanford University 1975-76 Visiting Professor, City University of New York Graduate Center (Spring) 1988 Visiting Bernhard Professor of Art History, Williams College 1989-90 Henry Luce Visiting Professor of the Humanities, Whitney Humanities Center Yale University MI'M1317/J/wer/ca, 71, 1983, 118-31. "A Thoroughly Modern Masked Ball," Art in America, 71, November, 1983, 121-88. "Malvina Hoffman: A Life in Sculpture," Arts Magazine, 59, November, 1984, 106-10. "Paris Commune Photos at a New York Gallery: An Interview with Linda Nochlin," by Jon Wiener, Radical History Review, 32, 1985, 59-74. "Watteau: Some Questions of Interpretation," Art in America, 73, January 1985, 68-87. "Renoir: A Symposium," Art in America, 74, March 1986, 103-1 16. "Courbet's L'origine du monde: The Origin Without an Original," October, Winter, 1986, 77-96. "Camille Pissarro: The Unassuming Eye (revised) in Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. Christopher Lloyd, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, 1-14. "Degas and the Dreyfiis Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite," in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (exh. cat) ed. N. Kleeblatt, New York: Jewish Museum; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 37-49. "Successes and Failures at the Orsay Museum, or What Ever Happened to the Social History of Art '^" Art in America, 76, January, 1988, 85-90. "Morisot's Wet Nurse. The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting," in Kunst um 1800 und die Folgen: Werner Hofmann zu Ehren, ed. C. Beutler, P.-K. Schuster and M. Warnke, Munich, Prestel-Verlag, 1988. Also in xvn Perspectives onMorisot, ed. T.J. Edelstein, New York: Hudson Hills, 1990. "La Revolution fran^aise de Zuka," introd. exh. cat., Zuka: La Revolution franqaise: un regard americain. Paris, Fondation Mona Bismarck, 25 March- 1 1 May, 1988, 3-7. "Judy Pfaff, or the Persistence of Chaos," introd. exh. cat., Judy P faff , New York, Holly Solomon Gallery, Washington D.C., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1988-1989,6-13. "Seurat's Grande Jatte. An Anti-Utopian Allegory," The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 14, No. 2, 133-154. "Le chene de Flagey de Courbet: un motif de paysage et sa signification," Quarante- //w/V/O/za/o/Te (Conferences du Musee d'Orsay), No. 1, 1989, 15-25. "Fragments of a Revolution," Art in America, No. 10, October 1989, 156-167, 228-229. "Pornography as a Decorative Art: Joyce Kozlofifs Patterns of Desire," introd. Patterns of Desire, by Joyce Kozloff, New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990, 9-13. "A House is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family," in Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Pohtics of Vision, ed. R Kendall and G. Pollock, London: Pandora Press, 1991, 43-65. "Delacroix's Liberty, Daumier's RepuhUc. Gender Advertisements in Nineteenth- Century Political Allegory," in XXl7Ie congres international d'histoire de I'art, Strasbourg 1-7 Septembre 1989: Actes (L'art et les revolutions: section 2) Strasbourg, 1992. "'Matisse' and Its Other," Art in America, May, 1993, 88-97. "Philip Pearlstein: Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer," Artforum, vol. 32, Sept. 1993, 142-43. "Vassar, Art and Me: Memoires of a Radical Art Historian," Vassar Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 2, Spring 1994, 20-24. "Body Politics: ^QxxxdMs Poseuses," Art in America, March 1994, 71-76, 121-23. XVlll "Gericault, or the Absence of Women," October, Spring 1994, 45-60. "Starting from Scratcii," in The Power of Feminist Art, ed. N. Broude and M. Gerrard, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. "Mary Frank," in Mary Frank, Messengers: Recent Paintings and Sculpture. New York: Midtown Payson Galleries, 1993. "Learning from the Black Male," Art in America, vol. 83, March 1995, 86-91. "Sex is so Abstract: The Nudes of Andy Warhol," cat. essay, Andy Warhol Nudes, New York: Robert Miller Gallery, Spring, 1995. "Cora Cohen: Recent Paintings," cat. essay. New York: Jason McCoy Gallery, 1995. "Cezanne: Studies in Contrast," Art in America, vol. 84, no. 6, June 1996, 56-67; 116. "Art and the Conditions of Exile: MenAVomen; Emgration/Expatriation," Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 317-337. "Kelly: Making Abstraction Anew," Art in America, vol. 85, no. 3, March 1997, 68-78. "Bonnard's Bathers," Tate, 14, Spring 1998, 22-30; revised version^/"/ in America (in press). "Art and its Audiences: A Personal View," Cuhurefront, Winter 1997-1998, 147-154. "Corot et le nu sans qualites," in Jean-Baptiste Camil/e Corot, Louvre, Paris, 1999. "Linda Nochlin on Nancy," in "Four Close-Ups (and One Nude), Chuck Close Portraits," Art in America February, 1999,66-67. "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry" (Interview with Yve-Alain Bois) Artforum, February 1999, 70-77. "Saluting 'Sensation,'" Art in America, December 1999, 37, 39. XIX SESSION ONE: 15 APRIL, 1998 [Tape I, Side One] SMITH: The question we start with is, where and when were you bom? NOCHLIN: I was born on January 30, 193 1, in Brooklyn, New York, at the Long Island College Hospital. SMITH: Could you tell me a little bit about your father and your mother? NOCHLIN: Yes. My parents were very young. I think my father [Jules Weinberg] was about twenty-two, my mother [Elka Heller] was twenty-one My mother had graduated from college, my father was kicked out of school; he didn't even make it through high school. They said it was smoking; I think it was drinking, because he was an alcoholic by the time he married my mother. SMITH: At the age of twenty-two? NOCHLIN: Uh-huh — before that, I think. They had met very romantically, in Paris. My mother was on a post-graduation trip escorted by her dance teacher, a woman named Bertha Auer. They were interested in modern dance, but they were interested in lots of other things, too. My father was on a trip through Scotland and then France. There's a marvelous photograph of him in his jodhpurs and hiking boots. They were a very striking couple. They met in Paris and they got married and I have their elegant wedding lines [marriage certificate], from the sixth arrondissement, I think. My mother saw James Joyce in a bistro and was very excited. She claimed he 1 winked at her, but of course with the eye patch, it must have been hard to tell. They were the second to third generation of Polish-Russian-Jewish immigrants. One of my grandparents was born here; the rest came over. But they had had very privileged childhoods. My father's brother went to Dartmouth, my mother's brother went to Harvard. SMITH: Where did your mother go? NOCHLIN: She went to Adelphi [University]. One grandfather was a doctor — a gynecologist and obstetrician. He had come over at seventeen. He had passed the high school equivalency at eighteen, learning English along the way, and he went to medical school right from there, which you could do at the turn of the century, and he became a doctor. He was very intelligent. When my uncle made Phi Beta at Harvard, he said, "Why not'^" He didn't think that was anything at all. I must say, learning and culture were highly prized in my family, although we had some good athletes, too. My father's sister, who is still alive, and ninety-one, was the New York state golf champion. My father hunted, fished, sailed, drove fast cars, rode fast horses. He worked for his father, who ran a news delivery company — Weinberg News and Company — and they delivered all the newspapers in Brooklyn and Long Island in the days when everyone read about fifteen newspapers. It was a very prosperous business. Even during the Depression it flourished, because the one thing people could afford was a nickel for a paper. So we were very comfy during the Depression. We had two yachts, we had a captain, we had houses in Florida, and Neponset Beach, and later in Chappaqua, and an apartment in Brooklyn, etcetera. It was a very comfortable childhood. I had lots of attention from everyone, because I was the only child and the only grandchild of four young grandparents, until T was eight. And aunts and uncles paid attention, too. Literature, art, dance, and music were of primary importance. There was no question. We were not a stodgy, dull, driven family. I think we were quite boisterous and flin loving in some ways. But those were the things that counted. SMITH: Did you live with your grandparents? NOCHLIN; No, I lived close by, though. One set lived in the same apartment building, and later moved a short distance away. In fact, one grandparent owned a big apartment building, so we all had apartments in it. I saw a great deal of my grandparents; they were extremely important in my life, as were other relatives, especially my uncle who went to Harvard. He majored in fine arts at the Fogg [Art Museum] and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the social history of art, in '36 or so. SMITH; What is his name? NOCHLIN: Robert Heller, his name was. Later on, he became a well-known TV producer and he produced Sir Kenneth Clark's first program, in England. He moved to England because he was a communist and had to leave very, very quickly. SMITH: Civilizaiion'^ NOCHLIN: Yes, Civilization, he was the producer So, in a way, it's all in the family. SMITH: Was your family left wing, or liberal? NOCHLIN: We would say left wing, which to people now is surprising. I thought radicals were all rich. Poor people were reactionaries, in my experience. The poor Irish, who were Catholic, were right wing. All the radicals I knew were wealthy Jews who lived either in Westchester or Brooklyn or the Upper West Side, and they were highly interested in politics. Many of them were [Communist] Party members, some were even Trotskyites, others were just left-wing Democrats. I would say that in my experience, until 1 went to Vassar, almost everyone I knew ... I mean, Roosevelt was as far right as people were willing to go. Everyone was to the left of Roosevelt, let's put it that way, yes. At the same time, we had servants, a yacht, and country houses, but that was totally normal at that point. SMITH: But you grew up with all this talk of politics? NOCHLIN: Very much so, and with my friends in high school, certainly, yes. I went to a wonderful elementary school, which I think was primary in shaping me, the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School. I also went to their camp. It was a sort of Deweyan, progressive school, and we memorized poetry. We made up a school play based on the Ancient Mariner, which we knew by heart — I still can recite it. It was a progressive school where you really learned a hell of a lot, and at the same time you always felt it was coming from you. When 1 hear this talk about "getting back to basics" and all, I think, "They're crazy. That's not how children learn." I was never brilliant at math, even though they taught it well, and if I felt like going and painting during the math period that was okay. It was an amazing school with marvelous teachers, and partly it was due to its principles of Ethical Culture, I think. We were read the life of Siddhartha, the Buddha, during rest period. We didn't say the pledge of allegiance during the war because they were pacifists, you see. We didn't fly the flag. We sang songs about peace and harmony, we never learned any patriotic songs. It was an amazing school, yes. SMITH: Was your family religious, or practicing? NOCHLIN; They were atheists. They had a deep sense, my grandparents, of Jewish culture My mother's father, the doctor, hung out at the Cafe Royale downtown and he was one of the earliest members of the Theater Guild. My mother remembers being taken to O'Neil's Strange Interlude when she was very young. Her father was very interested in theater, and he also read a great deal of literature. He was a friend of Sholem Asch, he was a friend of a lot of the current writers. He took me to this wonderilil exhibit called A Hundred Artists and Walkowitz at the Brooklyn Museum. I just got a copy of the catalog from a gallery dealer. He collected art, mainly by his friends, some of which are in this catalog. He really was interested in the arts. He had hopes that I would be a writer; he wanted me to be a famous writer and to go into English. He was a little upset when I went into art history, because he didn't feel it was as central; I mean, literature was what he cared about. The Theater Guild, that was it; that was the group he belonged to. He was in it from the start. He made me read Studs Lonigan when I was a little girl, very daring. He liked Irish writers, particularly. Lord Dunsany — Crock of Gold But Russian writers, too. It was expected, for example, that I would join in discussions of Crime and Punishment when I was twelve. I read all these books because I thought they were terrific. 1 never thought of culture as an obligation, I always thought of it as pleasure. Reading was something I wanted to drown in. We would go to the library in the summer, and I'd go through Thomas Mann, boom-boom-boom! My friends were doing the same thing. It wasn't considered outre in our group; that's what you did. I read 7 he Magic Mountain when I was twelve. It was the first year of high school, and my friend Alice, who is now, I think still, the president of SUNY New Paltz called me and said, "I haven't taken French yet, and they're talking French! Can you translate this whole section where they are speaking French?" So at two o'clock in the morning, I translated the French. People say that children or young people can't really understand these books. I think I understood The Magic Mountain with absolute clarity. I still understand what Settembrini and Naphta were arguing about. I didn't know anything about philosophy, but I could see one was liberal, and one was reactionary. It was totally clear, even the love scenes with Clavdia Chauchat. You don't have to have experience to understand books. Maybe some of Proust I didn't do until I was older, but with most great books, that is when you have to read them. I am not sure I could now. T read all of Dickens, T read Thackeray, I read everything. All I cared about was that an author wrote a lot, so that there'd be more from where that came from. SMITH: And you were studying French at an early age as well? NOCHLIN; Just first -year high school French, nothing great. We had French and Latin, and in college I took Greek, and then later on I had to learn Italian and German for graduate work I taught myself Italian. I took tutorials in German, and my German is terrible. I can't say I know it. I was good at the time, and for about ten years I knew it, and then it went. SMITH: In one of your essays ["Starting From Scratch"], in the volume The Power of Feminist Art, you talk about going to the Brooklyn Art Museum a lot and starting to write poetry. NOCHLIN: Yes. I was inspired by the museum to write a long poem called "The Ghosts of the Museum," and it was about my contact with the world of the past. Touching a mummy case which held the mummy of a little Egyptian princess, I could feel real contact. The poem ended on a pious note about the fact that our coffee pots. our cigarette cases, our accoutrements were going to end up in the museum just like the cherry-wood cradle, the mummy case, and so on. I would say that was my first direct realization of the self in history. I was feeling that I was in touch with it. It was totally wrong, of course, because there's no such unmediated contact with history, but for a kid it was like an electrical epiphany of some kind. The Brooklyn Museum was very central. I recently wrote an article for Culture Front about art and its audiences, starting with my own experience as a young person, when museums were the most exciting places in the world. We never saw them as dull. First of all, you met boys at the Museum of Modern Art; it was a meeting place [laughter] Aside from that, my friend and 1 would go up to the Cloisters; I have pictures of us posing there. We used to go there for the medieval music concerts, because ancient music was another big thing in our circle. I played the recorder, I sang madrigals. I'm a big collector of folk music and music in all languages. I loved medieval missae, and we used to go up to the courtyard of the Cloisters, all the way from Brooklyn, just for that experience. SMITH: And all your friends were of similar backgrounds? NOCHLIN: Well, yes, more or less. Some higher, some lower, some richer, some poorer. Most of them didn't have a father who was as good looking and sporty as mine. Most of them had portly, older, unsexy businessmen or doctor fathers. My "doctor" was my grandfather, and my father was this very dashing, elegant creature. 8 SMITH: And he was still working for — NOCHLIN: He worked for my grandfather, so it was not too problematic. SMITH: Did he have literary aspirations? NOCHLIN: No, he didn't, he never finished high school. He was expelled from the Peddie School before he graduated. But . . . nevertheless, it was very interesting. My mother adored Katherine Mansfield, and he could quote bits of Katherine Mansfield, which for a man, and an apparently macho man . . . you know: "I've seen the little house, she said." He knew all those stories, he read them. He also took singing lessons up in Lake Placid, where he had many connections, because of hunting, camping and fishing since the age of sixteen. He did woodcarving; he made rings, I still have some of them. He was fabulous at everything with his hands. I think he was very intelligent and very different from most people's fathers, I must say. We lived in Arizona for a year because he had arthritis, and he joined the honorary vigilantes and learned ring making from an Indian and met all the movie stars. There's a Jean Arthur doll here somewhere, I still have it, because they made a movie called Arizona, and she was in it. My father became friends with her and Robert Taylor, and a whole lot of other people. He was a glamorous figure, but not a very good father. I was much closer to my mother. But in some ways I'd rather have a glamour figure than a good father, I don't think you need such a good father, you need a good mother. You can quote me! [laughter] SMITH: Did your mother continue an interest in dance? NOCHLIN: Always. In fact, until the very year she died, we went together to the ballet; she lived right near Lincoln Center, and we would go to modern dance concerts, or ballet. We would dance together a lot when I was younger. We would just turn on the music and dance. My interest in dance is enormous. My daughter [Daisy Pommer], whom you saw, does dance for TV; that's her specialty, she's a TV producer. She just associate-produced a major film on Paul Taylor, the dancer, and she worked for Channel 13, for "Dance in America" for a long time. (The Paul Taylor film, Dancemaker, was nominated for an oscar.) So it's into the third generation, and I just love that. SMITH: Did your mother work at all? NOCHLIN: No I was her work And, believe me, I worked all through both my daughters' childhoods, and there's nothing like having a wonderfLil mother who is on for you full time. Fabulous, fabulous; it's a great privilege. 1 think women should work, but I'm real glad that I had my mother to myself I'm also an only child, and I think if there had been another I would have thrown it right out in the garbage, I was so attached to my mother. I'm kidding, but, there is sibling rivalry. I see it all around me, I see it in my grandchildren. But my mother was a person who directly loved, was critical of, and deeply interested in, especially literature. She read me James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist 10 when I was eight, when I had the flu, because she wanted to read it. She said, "It's full of animal noises, darling." She read me everything, and she made me interested, not because she was "trying to make the child interested," but because she was interested. I could see that she was interested, and it seemed natural. You see, I understood that culture was nature, culture was natural. It seems to me that that's the best way to get it. It's just part of your life. When they were building the Whitney Museum she used to stand for hours, watching. She was very interested in architecture and how things were made. She just loved it, she loved to watch. My mother had a deep, direct interest, unspoiled by professional interest, if I may say so. She was a true amateur, in the eighteenth-century sense. She played the piano with me, and 1 played the piano, or I'd play the recorder and she'd do the piano. We danced together. She took me and my friends to see Chekhov for my twelfth birthday. We went to the theater a lot; it was understood that you'd see every good thing on Broadway: I saw Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers — everything, everything that was good we saw. So, it was nice. SMITH: What were your favorite subjects in high school? NOCHLIN: In high school? English. English was my favorite subject. SMITH: Literature. NOCHLIN: Literature, yes. We had a poetry writing group that I was active in, along with a lot of my friends. We interviewed Dylan Thomas for the school paper. I 11 was interested in history, too, very much so. I remember I wrote a long paper on American imperialism. My high school was left, too. [laughter] In French class Madame Wolas was, I am sure, a card-carrying communist, as many were, and we would sing, "Arise ye who refuse to be bond slaves," which was the Chinese Communist anthem, which didn't help my French any. But I also painted. I was very interested in art and did a lot of painting in the art class. SMITH: What kind of art were you interested in? Was it modern, abstract art? NOCHLTN: Yes, modern, mainly. Picasso was a great god. It took a while before I got to Picasso, but I had always understood that abstraction was normal art, that art was not supposed to necessarily represent the world. Don't forget, my uncle was much, much younger than my mother, and he was in the Fogg. He was very close to John Coolidge, a big guy in art at the Fogg. They were in the same class, and I think they started a little modern art gallery together, in '34 or '35, or whenever it was. They were very close in college. So he was interested in all that. I had a Picasso over my bed as a little girl, a blue period, not abstract. A little girl. SMITH: Not an original. NOCHLIN: No! They were sophisticated but they didn't know you weren't supposed to have reproductions. Now, my grandfather brought original stuff. Daisy [daughter] lives in my mother's old apartment on Sixty-sixth Street, and they still have a lot of the paintings that my grandfather collected. But my mother had mostly 12 reproductions. I understood pretty early that abstraction was what the art of our time was about, or expressionism. In other words, I never had to learn in art history in college that realism was not necessarily the end-all and be-all. When I painted, myself, I did some abstraction, but I did mainly figure studies, which was what I liked. I remember I used to go to the Whitney Biennial, and if I liked a picture I would make a kind of scale painting of it, I'd get the catalog and I'd use graph paper and try to get myself a little scale painting, make it myself I still like to make my own art sometimes, mainly collage. But I loved art. The Brooklyn Museum was like a home away from home; it was quite nearby. We went in school, and I went with my parents, and I just went. When I was eleven I made up a portfolio of my work, and I brought it over to the museum's class for talented children, and I was accepted, so I went to the class for talented children at the Brooklyn Museum for about three years; I was fairly serious. SMITH; Were there teachers that you were particularly close to in high school? NOCHLIN: I'm trying to think. Boy, that was a long time ago, I remember my elementary school teachers better than the high school ones, but I do remember the high school ones, and ... I don't think so, not really. SMITH: It sounds like you were raised to be an independent person, a free-thinker in the positive sense, a self-realized person, to use language of the fifties, I guess. NOCHLIN: Yes, I guess so. True. 13 SMITH: I mean, the sort of woman for whom feminism would be either a given or not necessary. NOCHLIN: In a way, in a way. But don't underestimate the pressure of the culture; that's what's so interesting. Even if you're brought up that way. Especially for a teenager or a young person. The pressure of the culture. I mean, here we were, reading T S Eliot, and my friend and I produced Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine; we did all these wonderful things, yet at the same time we worried if we weren't popular, or if we didn't have the right kind of bobby socks. My favorite music was Bach, and I learned the piano so that I could play Bach, but I worried that 1 wasn't popular, just the same. I worried that I was too fat, and I worried I was ... I don't know, I just worried. 1 wasn't totally Miss Sunny Spirit in high school. I worried about my grades, even though my grades were superb, except for math. I think I have some faulty wiring where math is concerned. Even then, I sort of memorized math, but I did terribly on the college boards. I came out in the lowest 30th percentile in the country, even with tutoring! The minute I saw "chicken wire and dollars," I knew I was finished, [laughter] Even to this day I can't do it. Although I did well in logic, and in philosophy. I did extremely well with everything else. T worked very hard; I was always an incredibly concentrated worker. It didn't all come easily. Or rather, it probably came easier than I thought, but I was very resolute about learning things. I 14 had a good memory and I could really learn things up. I had a good time, I worked hard, but there was this incredible division. There was your teenage self, or your young adult self, which was gobbled up by cultural pressures, and then there was this other self, which was this self-realized person who knew what she liked and how to get there, and then there was almost a third self, which was a New York person, which permitted you to be that way, because our cultural ideal was not the football player or the cheerleader — we didn't even have a football team, and we sure didn't have any cheerleaders in our high school — but it was the bohemian, it was the ballet dancer, or the dancer in general, the look of the dancer — people like Juliette Greco in Paris, and so on. We didn't want curly blond hair, we wanted to be dark and thin and sullen. SMITH: Did you study dance yourself? NOCHLIN: Yes SMITH: Were you in the [Martha] Graham school, or the Doris Humphrey school? NOCHLIN: No, I went to Hanya Holm, actually, for a while, and then I went to somebody else; I don't know what school they were, but they were more like Hanya Holm than anything else, I would say. I took ballet as a child, and we had dance as a course in elementary school. My mother took me, and then I went with friends from high school, to the Needle Trades series of dance concerts, which were the best in the city. This was in 15 high school, and we saw everyone. I saw Appalachian Spring, with Merce Cunningham playing the preacher, I saw Doris Humphrey, I saw Jose Limon, I saw all the great dancers. They were gods, gods, gods. As was Wanda Landowska; she was the other goddess of our set. We'd go and hear her at the City Center and sit all the way up, and we threw bunches of roses at her feet. She was the great goddess. I have a photograph of her. SMITH: Did you like jazz? NOCHLIN: I liked jazz. But boys liked jazz more than I did. I went to jazz concerts. Frankly, I prefer blues and rhythm and blues. Jazz is a little esoteric. If I am going to listen to something I'd rather listen to Bach. But I appreciate jazz. I like Ornette Coleman, I must say; he's somebody I really love, very special. But I was not a jazz aficionado I would go and make the gesture, but my heart was always with classical, folk, blues, which is like folk. I love people like Aretha Franklin. I loved Odetta, who was a superb folk singer; I'd go to her concerts. But jazz wasn't a major interest. SMITH: Did you go down to Greenwich Village, to the scene there? NOCHLIN: In Brooklyn it's "up to the Village"! [laughter] Yes, I did, and we hung out on Eighth Street as high school kids; we were very adventurous. Later on, after college, actually, I had a boyfriend who played the five-string banjo. He was a disciple of Pete Seeger, and we used to do singing and listening in Washington Square, because people would be playing down there. So certainly, yes, we were in the Village a lot. SMITH: I assume there was never a question that you were going to go to college. NOCHLIN: Ouestion\ In my family, if you didn't go to an Ivy League college, this includes all my cousins and second cousins, you were too ashamed to mention it. I had one cousin who went to Boston University, the black sheep, and he always said he went to college "in Boston." He didn't say which one, because in my family the assumption would always be it had to be Harvard, or Dartmouth. My uncle (my father's brother) went to Dartmouth, and his sons went there, and his granddaughter and grandson went there, too. So it was Dartmouth, it was Harvard, and for the girls it was Smith, or Vassar or Barnard, but you only went to Ivy League colleges. If you didn't, as I say, you didn't mention it. Awfijl ... so stupid. SMITH: So you chose Vassar. NOCHLIN: Yes, I chose Vassar, partly because it was nearby, partly because my mother had had friends who had gone there, and partly because T thought it was a very good school, which it was. Wow, it was just terrific. It was a wonderful college. It offered a lot of big surprises to me when I got there, straight from the heart of Brooklyn, and rich radicals. There were people who had never heard of T. S. Eliot, there were people who didn't love Bach, there were girls who knitted, which I thought was something grandmothers did; I didn't think people of my age did 17 anything so demeaning. There were people who played bridge. I never associated that with an activity that I would do. I tried, but when they found out I couldn't tell bidding from playing they said I'd better try something else. I met people of my age who were Republicans, and, above all, I met a lot of people who were not Jewish, which was unusual, even though I had no religious faith. SMITH: Did you encounter anti-Semitism? NOCHLIN: No, not at Vassar. I mean, not overt. None that 1 could see. SMITH: Had you run into it as a child or a teenager? NOCHLIN: Yes. The only time I ran into it was the year we lived in Tucson, Arizona. There 1 did run into it, and it was not nice. It came from real rednecks. Well, you can imagine. Generally it was not so overt. It was a little bit of an undercurrent. I made a lot of friends out there, too. So that was the only time I actually ever encountered anti-Semitism. You wouldn't encounter it much in Brooklyn, that's for sure. And at Vassar, no. First of all, even back in '47, '48, when I entered, it had a fairly large Jewish population, probably more than any of the other women's colleges. Partly because it drew on New York. There were a lot of Jewish students there, certainly. Of course there were a lot of debutantes. Jackie Onassis was in my class. SMITH: Did you know her*^ NOCHLIN: Yes, I mean, to say hello. I knew her horse, [laughter] It was culture 18 shock in the beginning, it certainly was. Very Waspy. But there was a core of old time leftists and feminists among the faculty and among the students. You quickly find who your sisters are, and I did. I joined the newspaper, the Vassar Miscellany News, which always had a reputation for being radical. I was the editor of the literary magazine, I was the head of the philosophy club, I participated in the student musical productions. 1 just loved it. Except, you see, we were told that for fun we had to go on weekends with the opposite sex; we had to go to Yale or Harvard, or somewhere or other and have a boyfriend or a fiance. The fact was, we really had a much better time with each other. Now we realize that. The weekends were often awfiil. I mean, blind dates, spending a whole weekend with some guy you've never met before and you don't like*^ It was torture. Even if you were with a boyfriend, it was kind of intense to be with one person that much. But we women really had a wonderful time together. We had ftin, we laughed. I've never laughed again the way I laughed in college. There's a certain kind of laughter that just sweeps you away, you and a group of other women. You just laugh yourselves sick. You're often making fun of people. You can just let it all out, and I loved it. So I had a really good time at Vassar. But, again, I'd get all uptight about academic work, as usual. Exams, papers, I would turn green. I'd get pressured, and I was doing so many things. There was also the early fifties pressure to get married and have kids, and so on, which I wasn't very much into. 19 SMITH: So you felt that very much? NOCHLIN: Well, 80 percent of our class was engaged at graduation, including me, although I didn't marry the guy. So there was this pressure. It was after the war, people wanted to have big families, it was all, "go back to the family." [Tape I, Side Two] NOCHLIN: There were mixed messages about marriage and careers I remember for social psychology I did a term paper using something called content analysis, reading women's magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, and there were other ones, too. I found this very interesting dichotomy, which also interested my teachers; they wanted me to publish it. In the non-fiction articles, there would be all this praise of professional women or women activists, like Dorothy Thompson, or Eleanor Roosevelt, but in the fiction, which is where they got you in the gut, any woman who tried to be a professional at the expense of home, of motherhood, of her man, was a villainess, or was immediately punished in some hideous way. So you were getting two messages: one, through the emotions, through the fiction, telling women to go to the home, take care of your man, don't try to be better than a man, etcetera; then in the non-fiction articles, you read about the lives of all these famous women who had really accomplished a lot. So we were getting a double message. SMITH: What were you thinking that you were going to do at that point? NOCHLIN: I knew I had to be an intellectual. I majored in philosophy, actually, and 20 I minored in Greek and art history. I thought I wanted to be a writer, but then I thought 1 might want to be a professor. SMITH: A writer as in journalism? NOCHLIN: No, I wanted to be a novehst. Or, even more, a poet. I wrote poetry, and 1 had a poem pubHshed in Commetitary magazine when I was a sophomore at Vassar I had other poems published, too. So I was very hot to be a poet at that point. But I think in my heart of hearts I knew I couldn't live off being a poet, and for some reason I had no intention of letting a husband support me. I don't know why that would be, but that was not something that I really ever thought of as a possibility. Frankly, I have always disliked domesticity. I am a good cook, or I was — my kids laugh because I never do it anymore, but at one point I was a good cook. I am a rotten housekeeper. I have really no interest. I am interested in the pictures on the wall and certain shapes and colors, but — Even though we have just built a house out in the Hamptons, I have no interest in where 1 am; I could live in a hotel and be happy, I really could I have no real sense that my house reflects me. It does, obviously, you can see me right here. But that never interested me. 1 knew I wanted to get married and have children, which I did, at age twenty-two. 1 had my first daughter when I was twenty-four. But I married a philosophy professor at Vassar. SMITH: One of your teachers? NOCHLIN: No. I never would do that. I thought teachers were not what I was 21 after at all. 1 got my master's in seventeenth-century English literature at Columbia a year after I graduated. The head of the art history department was an absolutely superb person named Agnes [Rindge] Claflin. She was a finend of artists and she wore jewelry by [Alexander] Calder. She was a friend of [Pavel] Tchelitchew, and of a very interesting, mainly homosexual art and art dealing group. I took four courses in art history and I loved it, but it was a debutante's subject; I sure wasn't going to major in it. Philosophy was tough. So when I graduated, Agnes said to my mother, "We're going to get her back in art history." And I said, "Ha, ha. You're never getting me back in any shape or form." But sure enough, she called me and said, "The youngest member of the department is getting married, would you come and teach?" In those days you could just call up whoever you wanted. SMITH: You had a B.A. at this time? NOCHLIN: No, I had an M.A., but in seventeenth-century English. My B.A. was in philosophy. But she had thought very highly of my work and had me give a seminar report in the senior seminar. So, since my only job was girl Friday at Partisan Review, which was a job at that point which had absolutely no fiiture, except sleeping with a lot of famous men, probably, which was not something I looked forward to, because they were often not very attractive men, I decided to take this Vassar job. I taught art history, fifteen pages ahead of my students, some of whom were my friends, because I had only been out for a year. 22 It was then that I met Philip, who was my first husband. We liked each other, and just as important, I liked the world he was in. It was full of other intellectuals. He was a philosopher; he had studied at Columbia but he had gone over to Oxford for two years on a Fulbright and he knew all the Oxford philosophers. He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy. He had also done a lot of art as a young person. He studied with Raphael Soyer, and he still painted a bit. He had great friends, who happened to be my friends; they had been my former teachers, but now they became my friends, and it was a world I loved. There was not much money in it, to be sure; we lived in bohemian sloppery, but that was fine. We came in to New York to see the Living Theater, and we had wonderftil parties with dancing and drinking, and it was a very lively life. Then, after I taught for a year and I got married, I decided I had better do some graduate work in this subject, so I applied to the Institute [of Fine Arts] and of course got in. I started commuting from Vassar. Maybe for one term I actually lived in New York, but otherwise I did all my graduate work commuting from Poughkeepsie. SMITH: While you were teaching? NOCHLIN: While I was teaching, and then very soon, while I had a kid. SMITH: How did you juggle all this? Did you have a housekeeper, or was your husband particularly liberated for the time? 23 NOCHLIN: Yes, sure, he was very helpful. But he was ill, and he died when he was thirty-six and I was twenty-nine. He had asthma, so it was really hard for him to do a lot of things ... I mean really bad asthma. I had somebody who came in most days. I had a housekeeper. I had a very small apartment. But there was still cooking and cleaning and taking care of the kid, and life. I taught a children's modern dance class, I was a member of a poetry writing group, a recorder group, we went to the theater, we had parties, and I went to graduate school. SMITH: And you were teaching what? NOCHLIN: And I was teaching three-quarter time, waltz time. SMITH: Two classes or three classes? NOCHLIN: It was two classes, yes. But it took preparation, and sometimes in one class I'd have more than a hundred students, and we had no T.A.s; you corrected everything yourself I corrected everything at Vassar until the day I left. No T.A.s, no nothing; in the introductory course you did every single thing. SMITH: So you taught the Lascaux to Picasso class'' NOCHLIN: No. We all taught that, in a way; we had a wonderful survey course. Art 105 — famous. Each person taught his or her own specialty, but then everyone taught the sections. And I mean from full professor to low instructor. Everyone taught sections. So, in that sense, you could say that. Then I taught part of Northern painting, with my boss, Agnes, and modern. Yes, I had a pretty fiill program. And 24 then I just took courses that came out on Wednesday afternoon, when I was free, or Saturday morning. All my students at the Institute now are always worried about their program, whether it's balanced. I did fine, I took Wednesday and Saturday, whatever it was. It didn't really matter. SMITH: What about your fi-iends at Vassar, did they go into professions? Many of them got married, I'm sure, but — NOCHLIN; They did, but one of my roommates is a well-known scholar of English seventeenth-century literature and teaches at Boston College, Anne Davidson Ferry. Another, Isabelle Miller Hyman teaches architecture down at Washington Square and indeed followed the same trajectory that I did. She got her master's in English at Columbia, and then she went to the Institute. But she is an architectural historian, and she actually studied under my second husband, who was an architectural historian So those two, who were my roommates, certainly went on, and I think probably other ones did too, though they don't spring to my mind. Those people I knew best. SMITH: Did any go into business? NOCHLIN: Probably, but I don't know who they are. SMITH: I'd like to get a sense of the kind of reading that you and your social group, your friends, were doing. Were you reading Freud, or Jung, or that kind of psychoanalytic material? 25 NOCHLIN: You mean when'^ SMITH: Let's say in the fifties. NOCHLIN: Well, in the fifties I was already a grown up. SMITH: I meant before you went to graduate school. NOCHLIN: Before I went to graduate school, so that's up to 1952 — SMITH: Were you interested in psychoanalysis? NOCHLIN: I took a lot of psychology. SMITH: Or holistic psychology*^ NOCHLIN: I was interested in Gestalt psychology and made a great pitch for it in college. Teachers quivered when I came into the class, because I knew what I wanted I could get very obstreperous, because they were mostly into behaviorism and a lot of rats running around, and I had read all this Gestalt stuff, of course, as someone interested in the arts — [Wolfgang] Kohler, and all those other people, I can't remember who. But they thought it was hogwash. If you are a behaviorist you are going to think Gestalt is metaphysical hogwash. So I was interested in that. I did read Freud. In fact, I read Freud when I was a little kid, because my grandfather had An Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and I remember holding that book in my lap. I was always forced to listen to the radio because they thought my eyes would go bad from all the reading, so I had to listen to Jack Benny and all that stuff. But I could always keep a book on my lap. I kept a book on my lap even when 26 I ate, usually. And Freud was one of the books that I read. Especially the dreams, of course, I was fascinated by those dreams. I still remember a dream about a prostitute with earrings with blue stones in them; for some reason that intrigued me. But it wasn't really until later that 1 got interested in Lacanian stuff. I got interested in Freud when it was not so much a question of individual psychology as it was a kind of epistemology for understanding how people in general get to be what they are. As a feminist I became interested in Freud, yes, because I think Freud is a key figure. The dumb feminists — I shouldn't call them that, but you know what kind I mean — reject Freud as being oppressive to women. I think, on the contrary, without Freud, without a notion of the unconscious, without a notion of the transference, you are just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. I think Freudianism is a key tool for feminism for understanding how constructed we are. Our psyches are constructed. There is no such thing as natural femininity or natural masculinity. How hard it is to attain to a consistent sexuality. It's a struggle, it's not just something that happens. SMITH: Yes. NOCHLIN: I think that's the lesson of Freud, but I didn't learn that until much later. 1 loved reading the stories. Who was that guy who ran a clinic'^ [Karl] Menninger. I made quite a few modern dances based on case histories from Menninger when I was a teenager. The boy who chopped a cat in two; that was a splendid one. I loved 27 psychopathology; it was very inspirational. SMITH: So you ciioreographed as well? NOCHLIN: Yes. SMITH: I wonder, do you think that there were things that you could express, or problems you could work out through movement and dance? NOCHLIN: Sure. SMITH: It's a way of thinking very different from the discursive — NOCHLIN: Totally, yes, absolutely; I think that's what got me about dance. I think in some secret ways that dance, and my daughter will agree with me on this, is the greatest art form of all, and why? I am doing a seminar with Richard Sennett right now on art and theater, but since we are both wild balletomanes, it's mostly [Sergei] Diaghilev, ballet and dance, experimental dance at the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, and people like that One of the things we really feel is that dance is the highest form of art because it includes music, and [Igor] Stravinsky ... I mean, come on, that's the greatest music of all, and all the artists who participated in the Ballets Russes, and all the other things. So, maybe in opera this happens to a greater extent, but opera, though I like it, and love some of it, is not in my bones the way dance is. Dance is a Gesamtkunstwerk at its best. And it's thrilling because it is through the body. Even singing is like narrative and the body stands there, but dance is the whole self I just love it, I think it's the most thrilling thing to see a great dancer; there's nothing more 28 moving and more terrific. I've been watching these Yo-Yo Ma programs where he's doing the solo cello pieces. Some of them are terrible, beyond terrible. But to me the performance with Mark Morris, who I think is one of the great dancers of all time and a brilliant person, is what art is. The association between Bach, Morris, and Yo-Yo Ma is superb. I am going to get the videotape; I have written down the phone number you call to get it somewhere here, if I didn't lose it. So I think dance is the greatest art form, yes, but don't tell anyone else in art history that I said that; I love art, too. [laughter] SMITH: Were you reading Susanne Langer? NOCHLIN: Yes, uh-huh. I read Susanne Langer. I was not satisfied with Susanne Langer. She always seemed too vague; I never felt she got to the crux of things. I didn't like her. I did read her though, very carefijlly. I read John Dewey. Art as Experience was one of the books which we were assigned for the final examination I found that interesting, but aesthetics is not what interests me; it's too far from the work, it's too general. I like things that are more concrete, more working with the object. SMITH: Was there a sense of a women's intellectual tradition at Vassar? NOCHLIN: Yes, there was. But, again, I have to talk about the divided self SMITH: Right NOCHLIN: I had many women professors. Agnes was elegant, she was worldly, she 29 wore great clothes and jewelry, she was sophisticated, she was a woman of the world. A lot of them were tweedy, thick limbed, dykey, but not in an interesting way, not seductively dykey, but like toadstool dykes. Maybe you shouldn't leave that in . . . but you said I should be open, so I'm being open! [laughter] I would not aspire to be like some of my professors, even though I admired them. 1 think the notion that you like someone because you want to be like them is a big mistake. 1 adored my grandmother, but I certainly knew I never wanted to be like her. I wanted her to be like that for me\ I wanted her to be baking the cookies. She was a heavenly woman, she was a great fisherwoman, a great driver, very good on electricity and so on, but 1 knew I wanted to do something on a higher level. Yet, not for a minute would I wish her to be any different than she was. And she wasn't a role model — that horrible word which I despise and promised myself I wouldn't use, but it's convenient. You can admire people enormously but not wish to be like them. I don't think the one follows from the other. So I did admire a lot of these women teachers, but I knew that some of them were uptight, and so on. There were younger women teachers whom I really admired, and they were very naughty indeed. They did naughty things in the pews of the chapel and drank too much and drove fast cars, a few of them. Some of them were divinely doomed, too. I've always found doom very attractive in people; it's romantic There was one woman, eight years older than 1, who was a philosophy 30 teacher and she is one of my closest friends to this day. SMITH: Who was that*^ NOCHLIN: Her name is Mary Mothersill, and she was the head of the philosophy department at Barnard. I think she's head of the Philosophical Association. She has a house out on the Hamptons, where I also have a house. Now, her I admired. But she was a maverick; she was very pretty and attractive, and brilliant. SMITH; Now, it wasn't simply the fifties, but there was also this sense of, "it's a man's worid," and you had to fit into the interstices somehow. NOCHLIN: But I didn't feel it was a man's world. Vassar was not a man's world, and 1 taught there for many years. It became increasingly a man's worid as they attempted to break down what the Mellon Committee, which came to visit us, called a "homosexual matriarchy." They did everything in their power to get teachers who were young men with families, to give us the right atmosphere, and other boring things, but women were still comparatively in control there. There was never a chair of our department who was a man until my second husband became the chair, and that was very late. No, I thought of women as being able to run the show — there, not other places. One of things I was constantly told was, "Oh, Linda, you think like a man." Double take: What does that mean? That women can't think, that women flutter? I'm very tough-minded, and very smart, and I don't get carried away by emotion. I'm 31 rather an emotional person, but I don't get carried away. And I can say to a man, "Don't get hysterical," if he gets upset. I studied men very carefully to see what they were doing; it was interesting to analyze their behavior. You know, I don't think this is innate, I think it's how we're conditioned and how we grow up. I saw all too often how men would shut up and women would go "Tweet-tweet-tweet," and get fluttery. So I adopted the silent approach with men, and they'd get fluttery, in their way. [laughter] But it's interesting to watch how the different sexes cope with different things. One of the things I realized, at least for me, was that to maintain power, you don't expose your weaknesses. I learned that quickly, no matter what I've had some hard knocks in my life. My first husband died when I was twenty-nine, leaving me with a four-year old. My second husband died six years ago. So I've had two big deaths to cope with. And I have this illness, which isn't so bad, but it is cancer. And there have been other difficulties in life. Commuting to the Institute was very, very hard. I felt sometimes I just couldn't do it anymore. My favorite thing to do once in a while was just go to bed for a day, and lie there, because I was so exhausted, and in some ways torn into pieces. If I did my work for the Institute, I thought I should be correcting papers from Vassar. If I was correcting papers for Vassar, I thought I should be cleaning the house. If I was cleaning the house, which was rare, I thought I should be playing with my child. It went on and on I always remember looking out 32 the window to the house next door as I did the dishes and seeing Carl Degler walk out whistling, with his wife saying "Good-bye, dear," and I thought, "Uh-huh, it's different." What the women's movement did was give us institutions and structures. You see, one person doing their thing, if she's a woman, is an aberration. You really need a whole structure, a whole permission, a whole atmosphere that encourages. Otherwise, it's hard. SMITH: But to some degree weren't you from and part of a subculture? NOCHLIN: Yes. Yes, that was a help. But the subculture doesn't do the dishes; that's the point on a practical level. No, you're right, but you still feel guilty, and I think that's still a natural thing for a woman with a kid to feel. Or a father with a kid. Look at all these fathers who are leaving the government. It may be an excuse, but they say they want to be more with their families, and it's now acceptable for a man to say that. My second husband, Dick Pommer, insisted that he wanted to share the work, and it wasn't only out of feminism; it was because he wanted to. That's our wedding portrait by Philip Pearlstein. SMITH: It's very nice. NOCHLIN: Isn't it*^ It's a wonderful painting. It was very interesting, because I was used to running the kitchen my way, but of course if you want to share with somebody, you don't just tell them how to do it; they have ideas. My kids still 33 remember those fights over where we were going to hang this or put that; we both had forceflil personalities. But we worked it out, and he became a very good cook. He learned how. He also said he wanted to share the childcare, and he meant it. He didn't mean just changing a diaper once in a while. He took our daughter to the doctor, he bought her clothes, he listened to her needs and her complaints, and he said, "Having Daisy and being so close to her is the greatest thing that ever happened in my whole life." For him this was a major achievement and triumph. He was not a person who was close to people easily, and being close to this little daughter was just fabulous for him; they were like that, I mean, they just hit it off. I was so delighted, I thought that was just wonderful. Not having been close to my own father, I just thought that this was marvelous; here's my daughter, being so close to her father. That's great. SMITH: In the fifties, you had your Vassar life, and you had your Institute life. Did they complement each other, or were they in conflict? NOCHLIN: Well, there were times when I had a paper to do in one place and a class to teach. Yes, but on the other hand, no, because I was in the art history department, and I had all the books I needed right there, and I had colleagues who were interested in both places, like Richard Krautheimer and Wolfgang Lotz, who went to the Institute and were friends of mine up there. No, art history was a small world then, much smaller than it is now. Everyone knew everybody. It was actually very usefijl 34 for me to have Vassar contacts while I was there. The distance was the only problem, but otherwise, on the contrary, I was immediately welcomed into the Institute as a Vassar person; they knew who we were. SMITH: Did you consider going to Columbia and studying with [Meyer] Schapiro? NOCHLIN: I did, but it was understood that nobody ever got a degree with Schapiro; it took a hundred years Vassar's connection was either with the Institute or with Harvard. If you could go away you went to Harvard, but if you were interested more in other things — Yes, that's a very good question, because Schapiro, if anyone, was the model figure in my art history. He was the one; his "Courbet and Popular Imagery" article, his lectures, etcetera. His mode of thinking was the inspiration, in part. But I didn't take courses with him. Bill Rubin and I exchanged our lecture notes. He got Karl Lehmann's notes and I think [Richard] Offner's notes from me, and I got Schapiro's notes from him; I still have them So there was a lot of back and forth. SMITH: I know you took a class with [H. W] Janson. What was he like as a teacher? NOCHLIN: I thought he was terrific. A lot of people didn't share my view. He was not dazzling, he was not a charismatic teacher, but he was intelligent. Isabelle and I always said, "He's so intelligent." I thought he was fascinating. I thought what he did was of the utmost interest. I took a course on Donatello from him, which I thought 35 was fabulous, and then this nineteenth-century art course that was so lucid and so well argued. He had high intelligence, and a kind of personal organization. His History of Art — I don't mean the many revisions, but the original — is a wonderfijl book. Okay, it doesn't have women artists in it, and that's too bad. But, it's lucid, it flows, it comes from the heart; he just sat down and wrote it. I thought he was an excellent teacher. Janson really had a lot of faith in women. He gave a lot of jobs to women — partly because they came cheap. Down at the Square there were a lot of women who had to be in New York, who were married to businessmen or lawyers or doctors. And Janson got the best of them. The Square has always been a model of women art historians, right from the word go: Lucy [Freeman] Sandler, Isabelle Hyman, Carol [Herselle] Krinsky . . . there are a lot of others, too. So he was very good about that SMITH: What kind of guidance did they give you as you developed the Courbet project [re: doctoral dissertation: "The Development and Nature of Realism in the Work of Gustave Courbet"]? NOCHLIN: Not much. I didn't want it. I always felt it was degrading ... I mean, stupid! But I was very proud, I never asked for anything, I just did everything myself I would discuss ideas sometimes with [Janson]. I also studied with Robert Goldwater, who was my other adviser. I thought that he was such a reticent guy. 36 Very interesting, but kind of reticent. I always thought he didn't like me, because he never said anything, and then I went and looked at my own records at the Institute, and he said words to the effect "this person is going to change art history," so he thought the world of me, but I never knew it. How silly. I learned a lot from him. One of the greatest influences on me at the Institute was the classicist, Karl Lehmann, because he had this great, sweeping view of late antiquity. I thought I might even go into late antique art because I was so fascinated by this moment, partly from reading Merejekowski's novel, Julian the Apostate. This was a wonderflil moment of change, like the French Revolution; it has that wonderful quality. It was one thing and suddenly it's becoming another thing, and you can see it in the formal language: uglification, using a kind of collage, you knock the head off one emperor and put it on the body of Hercules . . . wonderful and bitter and terrifying. What interested Lehmann was the transformation of classical style in late antiquity. There were many nationalist theories about "Celtic blood," or the "Dura European blood," or whatever it was, and of course Lehmann had lef^ Europe because of the Nazis. So, it was very clear that he couldn't stand anything that had to do with intuitive notions of nation or race as an explanation for cultural change. On the contrary, he believed that it was suddenly the art of the lower classes, the lower orders in Rome that rose up as the empire began to decay and take primary place. This interested me, because this was the social history of art, but with a formal 37 expression of it. I was fascinated by this idea, and I wrote a paper for him because I was already interested in realism through Courbet, called "Antique Realism," which started with the Parthenon frieze and went through the later Roman Empire. I still think it's a very good paper. I used some of it in my article, "The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law." Lehmann inspired me; he was a great, great teacher. The more pettifogging classicists didn't like this big view, with lots of theory and social construction, but I adored it, and a lot of my methodology, in my early work, especially, comes from Lehmann. SMITH: Now, of course you have already written that your training was formalist, and this was a period where formalism was questioned. NOCHLIN: But, you see, the Institute was always less formalist. It was more iconography. You went to the Fogg for formalism, you went to the Institute for a more iconographic approach. I studied with Walter Friedlaender, who was eighty-five at the time; he was a great Caravaggio specialist. I also took some of his nineteenth-century courses, David to Delacroix was his famous book. I took a seminar in light in painting with him, and I wrote a novella about him. SMITH: Unpublished? NOCHLIN: Unpublished. I have to have it typed up. It's still in manuscript. But it's long; it's a novella, called The Age of Salzhnrger . Again, I had that epiphany when 1 38 was with him, the feeling that 1 was in touch with history, like I feU about that little princess in her mummy case. He had been part of the Stefan George circle, he had known famous nineteenth-century figures — he was eighty-six and this was in the early fifties. So I felt. My god, this is history! And that's what my novella was about, being in contact with history. It was very arty. I'm not sure how I would feel about it now. SMITH: It might be appropriate for a George-ist. NOCHLIN: Yes, absolutely. Friedlaender told us he had this girlfriend who would do her laundry once a year in this great fluff of soapsuds down by the river; she'd take all her clothes and dump them in, in an orgy of washing. I remembered that. There was really quite a group of people down there. They were very individual, very good scholars, but very imaginative. [Erwin] Panofsky used to come, too. They were mostly Germans, actually. All my teachers were, practically, except Goldwater. SMITH: Did you take classes with Krautheimer, or Lotz? NOCHLIN: Both, yes. Lotz was a close friend. I really liked him. And I was close to Hilda, his wife; we were in the same recorder group. But we talked a lot, Lotz and I; we talked about Paul Klee, we talked about all sorts of things. I took two different courses on Renaissance architecture, one with Krautheimer and one with Lotz. They sometimes would come into each other's classes and argue about stuff, which would have been wonderfiil if I liked architecture and was interested in the Renaissance. Frankly, I can't tell a ground plan from an elevation. I can, but I'm generally 39 interested in architecture, and certainly in modem architecture, deeply interested. And an interesting article or book on architecture will blow me away. I remember I was very much taken by, what's his name . . . you know, the first machine age — SMITH: Oh, Reyner Banham'^ NOCHLIN: No, well, Banham, yes, but first this German guy wrote the famous book. Mechanization Takes Command. SMITH: Siegfried Giedion. NOCHLIN: Giedion And just before I took my orals I read Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the Firs/ Machine Age. Well, it blew my mind. It blew my mind, because we took modernism so much for granted We took it for granted that it was the natural progression, the expression of the modern spirit, and so on, and here was Reyner Banham asking, "Why are they putting tailfins on radios? They aren't going anywhere." All of this came in so handy when I started feminist art history. Anything that broke up your notion of the natural, that made you think, "Hey, why are there tailfins on radios?" This has nothing to do with form follows fijnction, this has something to do with making something look like it's modern. All that deconstruction, not in the technical sense, but reflisal of mythology, and questioning of ideology had always interested me, right from the word go. It came in very handy later. SMITH: At the same time, you were teaching both lecture courses and seminars at 40 Vassar? NOCHLIN: Yes. Lecture courses, seminars, and sections. SMITH: And you were teaching yourself art history in the process? NOCHLIN: Yes, right, so I had a great advantage when I took my orals — I had been teaching for years. Eleven people came to hear my orals, [laughter] SMITH: How would you compare your teaching style with the teaching style of your teachers? NOCHLIN: They were all so different. Agnes was famous for being incomprehensible, and that's why all the smart people took her course. She was evocative and suggestive; she would never say anything direct. Once in a while she might, if you looked over your notes. SMITH: What was her primary field? NOCHLIN: Modern and French, but she had this incredibly indirect style, and the dumb students, the literal-minded ones, hated it, because they couldn't understand what she was talking about. [Tape II, Side One] SMITH: Was there substance to what she was talking about? I mean, it wasn't just grammatic blather? NOCHLIN: Oh no, it was not sentimental or anything, it was just evocative, suggestive. She refused to make it easy, in a way; she refused to make incorrect 41 generalizations. She was marvelous. So she was one type of teaching, and then there was Janson, who was pure lucidity, and there was Adolf Katzenellenbogen, who taught medieval at Vassar, who was organization with a human heart. Wonderful. His lectures on Chartres were totally organized but very rich in personal interpretation. And then there was Krautheimer, who was a wild man who broke the lights on the desks, he'd get so excited and enthusiastic — truly charismatic. In his lecture on St. Peters, he would make you into a pilgrim coming over the river into the little narrow dark winding streets that led to St. Peters. We all hated Mussolini because he pulled down the Spina and made this big superhighway where all these little dark houses had been. You were supposed to creep through these alleyways and all of a sudden that great piazza would open up. It was of course a kind of allegory of Christianity; it went from a crowded creepy darkness into the light and open, measured space. Then he'd lead you up the facade and he'd give you the first view from the bridge. He was just a fabulous teacher, fabulous. But very histrionic and fijll of energy. Lotz was much more off-handed and cool. Lehmann was brilliant; he had endless sentences. You had to write everything as quickly as you could, otherwise you didn't know what he was going to come up to. They were all very different, and I certainly took something from a lot of them, I think, in my way of teaching. Which of course more and more became my way. As you get older you digest it all and reprocess it and it becomes yours. I don't 42 know what my way of teaching is; I'm very unaware really of what it is. You know, sometimes it's good and sometimes it isn't. Let's put it that way. SMITH: What were the debates that interested you most in art history at that time? NOCHLIN: I suppose how political ideas get into art; that really interested me. SMITH: Was Robert Herbert already writing? NOCHLIN: No, he was my age; he certainly was somebody of my age that I was interested in. Also Meyer Schapiro, because of the complexity of his thinking. I was never antiformalist I think without the study of form you're not doing art history; it all comes out through the form. But what mediates between certain patterns of ideas and the work of art? How are these ideas expressed in the formal language in the work of art "^ That's what is interesting. Schapiro had written the key article in my period about that: "Courbet and Popular Imagery." That article made it very explicit. Courbet as a man of the people at the time of the 1848 revolution wants to borrow the formal language of popular art — stiffness, unarticulatedness, anticlassicism, flatness, the components of so-called naive art or the mia^erie d'Epinal — and appropriate them for ambitious high art, like the Burial af Omans. The fact of the matter is, when you go to the Louvre, or I guess it's the Musee d' Orsay now, and you look at the Burial a/ Ornans, you say, as my mother did, "What a weird picture; it's not like any other picture." It isn't like any other picture, because Courbet really was developing a different kind of art language. 43 He didn't particularly go on with it, or it was on and off, you might say. He was not a poor guy, he came from an upper-middle class provincial family, but you can see, in a certain sense, how certain ideas that were congruent with those of the quarafUe-hiiitards could get into art in a very obvious way. Other things are much more difficult. Courbet is an easier case in point because his politics are pretty clear and what happens to his style is pretty clear. But that was certainly one of the things that interested me. Then I remember going around with my friend Barbara Knowles Debs, who was at Harvard, one of my earliest students, and we would argue about whether every work by a great artist was great by virtue of his being great, or do you have to consider it case by case"^ Now I can't remember who thought which, but we fought like hell about this. We were at a Picasso show. But that was certainly a question. SMITH; Did you believe in the concept of genius at this time? NOCHLIN: I don't believe in the way it has been reified, or the way it has been used as an explanation, but do I believe that there are artists who were greater than other artists'^ 1 sure do. [laughter] I'd be nuts, otherwise, I think. Yes. But whether genius is an adequate term — There's that wonderful book by Otto Kurz and Ernst Kris [Legend. Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment], which was my bible. I read it in German, because it wasn't translated yet, at the time I wrote, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" That says it in a nutshell, 44 how these myths develop, and for what purposes. I'm still very interested in that. One of my best students, Aruna d'Souza, is writing a doctoral dissertation on, so-to-speak, the construction of the myth of Cezanne, which is a very interesting problem. I said, "The first thing you need to find out is whose needs are being served by this construction?" And I meant conscious and unconscious needs, of course: the lonely artist, the artist whose drawings, even as a child, are marked with genius. As I point out in "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" there are hundreds of people who grow up to be shoe salesmen whose childhood drawings were brilliant. Why do some of them become Picasso and others not? There are endless numbers of brilliant draftsmen, and women, who are children. SMITH: Or even who are adults. NOCHLIN: Or even who are aduhs. I remember in my class for talented children, there were marvelous young artists. It's not because their genius blew out, but because the particular circumstances of their life and society were not supportive. SMITH: What about Arnold Hauser, or Frederick Antal? NOCHLIN: Yes, I read them, and 1 was interested. I thought Hauser was a little simple-minded, but he is still interesting. It was a different way of looking at art. It seemed a little simplified, but I certainly read them. Antal I found absolutely compelling and fascinating, because he really was interested in the art part of it, too. His work on Gericault, and on some of the others was very good. They were 45 important. SMITH: Was [Theodor] Adomo, or any of the Frankfurt School important to you? NOCHLIN: The Frankfurt School, yes. Adorno, I became more interested in later. This was all postfeminist. SMITH: He was big in the seventies. NOCHLIN: Yes, and that's when I got interested in the Frankfijrt School. Hannah Arendt, I suppose, was the person who was contingently Frankfurt School who I was interested in at the time. I read a lot of Simone Weil. I read . . . what's her name? When her book first appeared. Why am I blocking this? SMITH: [Simone] de Beauvoir? NOCHLIN: Yes. When [The Second Sex] first appeared, one of my fellow faculty members, a woman named Christine [Mitchell] Havelock, who taught classical art at Vassar, said, "Have you read this?" She said it was fascinating, and I said, "I don't need to read feminists." Then about a year later I picked it up, and it was indeed fascinating That was the book that really turned me on. It is a brilliant book, and it says things that nobody ever said before. Maybe Mary Wollstonecraft, or John Stuart Mill, but never so coherently and so all in one place, and so brilliantly. That's a major document of intellectual history in the West, really important. And not outdated. SMITH: And at the time it was widely available; it was a drugstore book. NOCHLIN: Yes, paperback; that's what I had. 46 SMITH: How did you settle on Courbet? I know it grows out of 1848, and he's logical for that. NOCHLIN: Well, serendipity usually plays a part. I did like his work. The guy who had been best man at our wedding was a First Amendment test case, Lloyd Barenblatt, so I was very involved in politics and the politics of freedom and anticensorship and anti-McCarthy. Not just abstractly, but T was organizing rallies and going to things and trying to help this guy. And I did a paper on a group of Diirer's students who were called the Nuremberg Kleinmeister. They were sixteenth- century Anabaptists and atheists who came to trial in Nuremberg for blasphemy and just escaped with their lives This was a famous case involving artists 1 knew about and was interested in. So Courbet was perfect. He was everything I wanted. 1 started with 1848 and the artist, and then I thought, why not do a major figure inside that, instead of doing all of '48, which 1 gave as my Frick talk, opening in 1956 with a quotation from Karl Marx. Dead silence, you know? [laughter] People were terrified. I mean, really, they looked at each other, and Friedlaender said, "Ach, Linda, you're so brazen!" But Courbet incorporated all these things. I had started out in the seventeenth century, but, frankly, I didn't want to work on Christian, Catholic art. No. Not my thing. Secular, French. France has always been my country of choice; I love everything French, and I knew French literature and I knew the French language. 47 SMITH: Had you traveled to France already? NOCHLIN: No, 1 didn't go until '58, '59. I had a Fulbright, and that was the first time 1 went. SMITH: Obviously you couldn't really go in the forties. NOCHLIN: No, and I got married so young and had a kid. So I was a Fulbright in France with our daughter and my then husband had some other kind of fellowship. SMITH: So you went together? NOCHLIN: We went together, but we weren't together. He was in England doing philosophy, and I was in France, and we met on weekends. SMITH: And your daughter stayed with you? NOCHLIN: Me, yes. 1 had an au pair. 1 worked on a novel in the afternoon and did my research in the morning. I still have fifteen hundred pages of that novel, which is called Art and Life. SMITH: What is the general subject matter? NOCHLIN: You don't want to know, [laughter] But it was a kind of triptych, the novel, and the central part of it was the contemplation of the Isenheim Aharpiece, which I published separately. It was my first publication, by Red Dust Press, called Mafhis af Colniar. That was part of that novel. The rest of it . . . oh, my goodness. 1 was heavily influenced by [Andre] Gide's Counlerfeiters, which I had read in high school and then read again — that whole idea of the book within the book within the 48 book, which was very interesting to me. The nouveau roman was coming out. I loved Nathalie Sarraute, a wonderful writer. So I wrote that novel, and I did my Courbet research. But the state of mind you have to be in to write a novel is so different from doing research. In one you are critical and objective and in the other you have to let the juices flow. A little hard, but when you are twenty-eight ... I had energy to burn, obviously. SMITH: What about the friends that you developed in France as you started working there? NOCHLIN: I had a classmate from Vassar who married a Frenchman, Paulette Dougherty. She had married somebody named Jean-Claude Martin. I saw her. I saw a lot of Americans, to tell you the truth, but through Paulette I got to know some French people. I got to know some people at the museums, I got to know the head of the Societe des Amis de Gustave Courbet. Actually, some of the museum people were very nice and very helpful. I was kind of busy. Here I was, I had a kid, I had research, and I was writing a novel. I know I had friends, and I know I had French friends, but aside from Paulette, 1 don't remember. I was close to some other Fulbrights, really; that was more my speed. SMITH: I guess I'm wondering how American art historians and French art historians working on similar topics intersect, or do they, even*^ NOCHLIN: At that point they didn't, really. I went to hundreds of museums, I 49 immersed myself in French culture. But it wasn't until later that I really got to know a lot of French people. I was so interested in Paris, in France, in traveling, and seeing, and reading 1 read in French like a mad fiend. I just never stopped. I would go to the Bibliotheque Nationale. When I was writing my novel I would also read novels. I read all of [Henri de] Montherlant; I was very interested in him And the contemporary novels, the tiouveau romau. [Alain] Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, people like that. SMITH: Who were your closest friends amongst the students at the Institute at that time*^ Did you develop a network? NOCHLIN: Absolutely. Robert Rosenblum, who is still my pal, A wonderfijl guy named Richard Carrott, who died recently, but who had a place in France and whom I used to see. Who else? Isabelle, who had been my roommate in college. Lucy Sandler, whom I still see. We all do New Year's together, which is interesting. SMITH: That's nice. NOCHLIN: I'm sure there are other people, too. Those were the closest, and I certainly kept up with them. Of course, I wasn't in New York, so most of my friends were up in Poughkeepsie, at Vassar. But those were the ones I was close to down here. SMITH: Was Richard Pommer involved with the Institute? NOCHLIN: He was, but we were both married to different people at the time, and 50 we knew each other by sight. He came there a little after I did, actually. But I didn't really get to know him till my first husband had died. I had been living with somebody else for eight years, and then he came to Vassar. I met him personally at Vassar; that's how I got to know him. SMITH: Oh, when he came to teach at Vassar in the art history department? NOCHLIN: Yes, the art history department. It's sort of amazing, I got two husbands out of Vassar, and when you consider the odds against that, [laughter] And I was hardly a femme fatale! SMITH: What about the Warburg school? I know I am jumping around a little. NOCHLIN: Well, jump! My mind jumps. SMITH: Were you being exposed to that? Panofsky would come occasionally, and he had somewhat of a relationship. NOCHLIN: Yes, it was mainly through Panofsky. I don't know who else at the Institute you would think of In a way, Lehmann. SMITH: [Rudolf] Wittkower was at Columbia from '56. NOCHLIN: Columbia, yes. Certainly I read the Warburg Journal, that was one of the bibles. That was where Meyer Schapiro published "Courbet and Popular Imagery." Yes, I certainly fell under the spell of Warburgian analysis, which was the alternative to pure formalism, in a way. But I also, I have to add, was very much impressed by Clement Greenberg. He was the writer who wrote about contemporary 51 and modern art, in some ways. He was an important figure, as was Harold Rosenberg. They were seen as two sides of an argument for modern art. And Andre Malraux was certainly an enormous influence in the fifties on my philosopher husband and on me. SMITH: The Voices of Silence? NOCHLIN: Yes, immensely seductive and interesting and influential. It was, in Benjaminian terms, the end of the aura, but the reimposition of a different kind of aura, if 1 can put it that way. The end of the aura of the original work perceived in situ, but the beginning of a generalized aura around images of all kinds and all shapes, a re-aurafication — a horrible term, but it really was. Malraux was a magic writer. Man's Fate, certainly. 1 also saw the film he did about the Spanish Civil War, called Man's Hope. SMITH: Yes, L'espoir. NOCHLIN: Fabulous. And, of course, I knew all the songs. SMITH: So you grew up with the Spanish Civil War? NOCHLIN: That was the first thing I remember, politically. SMITH: Graduate students since the seventies have had this concern about method and theory Did you see yourself developing a method, and how did you relate to theory? NOCHLIN: I had been trained as a philosopher. I took a seminar in art theory when 52 I got to the Institute, with Rensselaer Lee, a famous art historian. He wrote a very important article called "Ut Pictura Poesis." That was his one shot, because everything else he did I thought was strictly for the birds. He taught on Saturday. I rushed down to study art theory with him, and I was assigned Plato and art. Well, I thought the other students were so dumb: I was infuriated. My methodology was basically Wittgensteinian, English, British linguistic philosophy That was what I had been trained in, partly, and that was what my husband did. So that was my methodology in art history. It was critical. And I heard these dumbbell reports, which were like, "And so-and-so said, and then so-and-so said." I was horrified at the lack of critical or theoretical, not in the modern sense, intelligence. So 1 did this paper on Plato's theory of art, and of course I had read Plato in Greek, and my husband was a big Plato person. I pointed out that Plato was not talking about art in our sense of the word at all; he had no theory of art. Forget it. I went on from there to say what he was talking about, in terms of the latest British linguistic philosophy. Well, whoever this teacher was, he almost fell down and licked my feet. Not quite, but he was amazed. He didn't expect anything like this. Then I did another paper on Michelangelo's sonnets. But the general level of theoretical awareness . . . you see, I had it from philosophy. I did have a methodology, which was British analytic philosophy. I still find it cropping up in my thinking at times. SMITH: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you define what a historical 53 explanation is, or what makes a historical explanation satisfactory to you, for example, in "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" NOCHLIN: I would say that's more a set of social explanations. Historical would be a little more diachronic. I work in synchronic areas, so to speak. And that's how I think. I'm always very averse to making ahistorical generalizations, let's say, about women and women's creativity. People ask me questions about Artemisia Gentileschi, or people before the eighteenth century, and quite honestly I feel I don't know, because I don't know that historical period. I feel you have to embed yourself in a certain cultural nexus. You have to read the literature, you have to read the newspapers, you have to read the criticism, you have to look at the photographs. It's so interesting to see how wrinkled all the chic clothes were in the nineteenth century, before there was permanent press. It's certainly not classical drapery. It's just plain crumpled, sometimes. As far as I am concerned, you really have to immerse yourself in a certain culture before you are entitled to work on it. Now, there are people who float around from this to that and the other. I can't do that. Sure I have opinions and so on. That's partly why I never had any deep relationship to art from other cultures. I would say I am closest to African art, but that's because it was part of modernism, so to speak, and I get what that is about from a modernist viewpoint. So my sense of history is a thick history; I mean, it's history that takes years to absorb and assimilate and think about and critique. And then you 54 have to have the machinery inside your head for understanding and assimilating and putting together and rejecting the mythology, always knowing that you are never going to get to the real history. It's always going to be partial, it's always going to be contingent; that's the introduction to my new book, which is called. Against Methodology: Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian. I think that gives you some idea. I like [Claude] Levi-Strauss's notion of bricolage and Clifford Geertz uses that. I like that notion. SMITH; The thick texture. NOCHLTN: Thick texture, bricolage, contingency, fragmentation. On the other hand, underneath, I want to pull it all together, but I always avoided that. I can't. There's something in me that just won't. But you can understand why people want to do these holistic, totalizing things. It's a great artistic, aesthetic satisfaction. But I didn't write that book on the fragment for nothing [The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as Metaphor of Modernity]. In a way, it allegorizes my own position about modernism and modernity. Although there's a strong drift of course toward totalization in a lot of modern thinking, that's not my drift. SMITH: But the practice of art history is often marked by the focus on the individual work, which then is in tension with the theoretical framework. NOCHLIN: Yes, it is, it is. Rosalind Krauss, one of my very good friends, and probably one of the smartest art historians working, just did the Picasso papers, and 55 she has done many other things. She works with a theoretical intensity, but also focuses very heavily on the object. So there are strains in that. But there are strains in whatever you do. You are never going to find a perfect methodology, and my notion is that different situations, which includes the object, the history, the mythology and so on, demand different approaches. Who was that wonderfijl phenomenologist? I was very much under his spell for a while. SMITH: [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, or [Paul] Ricoeur? NOCHLIN: No, getting close SMITH: [Mikel] Dufrenne"^ NOCHLIN: No, he wrote about fire and water. SMITH: Oh, [Gaston] Bachelard. NOCHLIN: Bachelard. When I was doing the Courbet, his books La Terre et les reveries de la volonte, and La terre et les reveries du repos were very important for getting beyond the usual art-historical stuff into something else. He I thought was wonderful And who is the one who wrote about education? Swiss. SMITH: [Jean] Piaget. NOCHLIN: Piaget had a big impact on me. I read a lot of Piaget. I found that very central to my way of thinking. Piaget talks about adaptation, how you adapt to what's out there and then you adjust what's out there to what you've instated within yourself To me that's what writing art history has to do with. You write it, and what you have 56 written makes you look at what you are talking about differently, and then that difference makes you change your mind about things. So I like to let this back and forth process happen. I do talk about my ideas a lot with my students and with other people, but 1 am very reluctant to let people look at my unfinished work. I don't want criticism from others. The only person I ever showed my unfinished work to was my husband, Dick, and he showed me his. And we could be no holds barred and yet not destructive with each other, and I really miss not having him, because there's nobody else that I can do that with. I have to be so close to that other person and he was the only one I was that close to, in a way. It's a pity that neither of my daughters are interested in that kind of thing, but they aren't. SMITH: In terms of your original work, your dissertation on Courbet, how do you think your arguments have held up against subsequent work in that area? NOCHLIN: You might say I unleashed a flow. I think what Tim [T. J.] Clark did is much denser and more complex, and more Marxist and more dialectical, but I don't think it's any righter I still think it's quite good, what I wrote. For its time and place. SMITH: You didn't publish it, except in bits and pieces? NOCHLIN: Yes, because I was always going to write the book. But then I did the show with Sarah Faunce [Conrhet Reconsidered] and I'm publishing the big section, which I think is my most important contribution; the two-part essay on The Studio is now in press, in a collection called Representing Women that Thames and Hudson is 57 doing. So it's coming out there. And I don't want to write another book on Courbet. It was up for publication, and Meyer Schapiro Hked it but said it needed some rewriting He thought 1 should publish the wandering Jew part right away, which I did, and I got the Porter Prize for it. But I'm not interested enough to go back to it. Enough has been written. I always feel, if somebody really terrific writes about something, it's wonderful I don't have to work on that, so-and-so has done it. I really feel a sort of relief SMITH: I was just thinking in terms of how one constructs a career, how you build a trajectory. You didn't publish your dissertation. NOCHLIN: But I published [Realism and Tradition in Art, J 848- J 900:] Sources and Documents. SMITH. Right, and then Realism. NOCHLIN: And then Realism, which was exactly in the same field, but more general. I made my first reputation by writing a hideously critical but very smart review of a book by another Princeton scholar, Joseph Sloane, on an obscure Lyonnais painter, [Paul Marc Joseph] Chenavard. I tore it to shreds, I just ripped it apart, using quotations from Sartre and from other people. Janson, who was editor of The Art Bulletin told me this guy's friends threatened to sue, though there was nothing ad hominem about this review. He thought of himself as a social historian, but I thought this book was terrible. Meyer Schapiro had given a very negative 58 review to his previous book, which was called French Painting between Past and Present. When I published that review, I got five letters, from publishers, magazine writers, and so on, asking me if I had anything I wanted to publish. So I made my reputation by slaughtering this poor, innocent guy who actually was quite nice. But I think that has nothing to do with it; I thought this book was wrong, its methodology was all wrong, and its conclusions were all wrong It was a totally untheorized, unself-critical book. So that's where I really established my reputation I already was thought of at the Institute as assertive . . . assertive? Unafraid, let's put it that way. Which wasn't really true, inwardly, but that's how I seemed. So the trajectory was really from there, and then Janson asking me to do Sources and Documents, which was one of the best things I could have done then. It was originally supposed to be one volume, but I produced exactly double the amount, so Janson said we would make it two volumes, so we did Realism and Tradition and we did Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, [1874 1904: Sources and Documents]. That was a project which was just perfect for somebody at my stage. Because, first of all, it meant getting a mastery of all the critical literature. I read and read and read. But it also was something I could do in short bursts. It was wonderflil for somebody who was both teaching and had a young child. I could set my child down in the middle of the circle at Vassar and do a little translation, a little reading, put it down, and come back. It wasn't like writing a 59 whole, continuous book. So it was very, very good for me. Tiien I was asked to write Realism. And that I think is one of the best things I have ever done. I still stand by that. I wrote it with enormous interest, because there was really nothing connected with realism, and it was nominated for the National Book Award. But it got a devastating review, anonymous, from Douglas Cooper, who was having some kind of in-group fight with my editors, and he demanded to review the book so that he could savage them. I read the review in the Times Literary Siipp/ement and 1 went to bed and cried. I stayed in bed for a while, and then my husband said, "Oh, look at the New York Times] You've been nominated for the National Book Award!" So I leaped out of bed. [laughter] But I still think it's a very good book. I say this about myself, because in a funny way I am very detached from what I've worked on I can see weaknesses, I can see strengths, but I think that's a good book. And, you might be interested to know, I wrote practically all of it when I was pregnant, thereby smashing all those myths about falling into torpor, or whatever. It really doesn't affect you at all. At least I don't think it did. SMITH: Just to begin wrapping up for today, you also had artist friends at this time, or you began to know contemporary artists? NOCHLIN; Certainly. Pearlstein— SMITH; This was in the fifties and sixties, and the New York scene? NOCHLIN: Right. Of course I wasn't on the New York scene, I was at Vassar 60 College, which is something a little bit different, but in the late fifties I did a show at Vassar called Realism Now, which was written up in New York magazine, it was on the cover. It was the beginning of the interest in the realist revival. SMITH: So that's how you came to know Pearlstein. NOCHLIN: That's how I got to know Pearlstein, yes. And so many other artists . . . Sylvia Sleigh and Richard Estes — I've just been rereading it because I'm on a Chuck Close panel. He was not in the show, but a lot of prominent realists and photorealists were in that show. SMITH; So you were starting to think about what comes after abstraction? NOCHLIN: Right, I was. It was a postmodernist phenomenon, really. I think the Chuck Close show now is opening up some of those same issues. I'm on a panel at MOM A in about ten days, when I get back from England. I'm going to England to be in a Bonnard symposium. I am very interested in Bonnard at this moment. I wrote an article in the Tate magazine about his bathers. I think there's an interest now in figure, in representation, just a little trickle of it coming up. [Tape II, Side Two] NOCHLIN: The thing about Vassar and Agnes Claflin was that we'd always thought that there were women artists, in a way. Our sculpture teacher, Concetta Scaravaglione, was a woman, and Agnes collected women artists. We had a beautifiil Florine Stettheimer, we had a Georgia O'Keeffe, and a lot of women artists came up 61 to talk, to lecture. So I certainly thought that there were women artists. Grace Hartigan made an enormous impression on me, both as a person and as a painter, I think she was a marvelous painter. So I had no trouble with the notion that women were artists, none at all, and I certainly knew some of these people. I'm trying to think of other artists that 1 knew at the time. There was a wonderful artist named Rosemarie Beck, who also taught at Vassar. But 1 wasn't thinking in terms of men and/or women, I just included women in the group of people who made art. I just thought, there they were. SMITH: You've written about Joan Mitchell, did you know her? NOCHLIN: I knew her work. I didn't know her, no. I didn't know her until later, when 1 started going to France. SMITH: Stettheimer was someone whom, in a sense, you grew up with, with that work around you. NOCHLIN: Exactly, yes, I did. And that was one of the reasons I was so interested in it, because that was part of my experience every day. SMITH: I don't want to misphrase it, but in reference to your argument about another way of thinking about a politics of art, was that something that was in the air at Vassar? NOCHLIN: No. That was my idea. SMITH: Okay, so Claflin wasn't talking in those kinds of terms'^ 62 NOCHLIN: No, she was not into that at all. SMITH: Okay. How did the McCarthy period affect you, personally? Given that your family was left wing? NOCHLIN; Well, it made my uncle leave the country and never come back. Never, even when his mother died The FBI was looking for him, so he couldn't come back. So that was one way. The best man at my wedding went to prison, along with Chandler Davis; they were both First Amendment test cases. In some ways it ruined his life, it was a terrible thing. I was very active against McCarthy, and Vassar planned what to do if it came up, whether one should talk, and I said I wasn't going to answer any questions. It never happened, thank goodness, but I was active And my husband at that time was active. We had personal reasons, very much so. I was very concerned. SMITH: Did you continue to be politically active, in the peace movement, or civil rights'^ NOCHLFN: Yes. Well, I was all for civil rights. I don't know that I did much about it, but I certainly marched in a hundred anti-Vietnam War marches. In fact, I knew Washington mainly as a place that you marched through. I was certainly active, very much, in the peace movement. In fact, Dick and I got close through our activity in the peace movement. And I was active in the women's movement, of course. We marched for abortion. I don't know how many pictures I have of us on all those 63 marches. SMITH: You talked about having read de Beauvoir, and then in '63 [Betty] Friedan's book comes out [The Feminine Mystique]. What did you think of that? NOCHLIN: Oh, I agreed entirely. It didn't have the same intellectual substance, it didn't inspire me in the same way, but it's enlightened and very brave journalism. I thought it was terrific. SMITH: And then I think in the same year Mary McCarthy publishes The Group. NOCHLIN: Before that. She published that in the fifties. SMITH: I thought it was '63, but— NOCHLIN: No, it wasn't. I'm sure it was before. [Calls out:] Daise, can you get 7 he Group on the internet? [laughter] We can find out. Well, anyway, I think it was earlier, but it doesn't matter. She came up to Vassar at one point, when I was still a student, and I think she had written 7 he Group by then. And that was more like the fifties, but I may be wrong. But that was hardly a political book. That was a vision of a certain group of women and a certain class. It was a wonderfijl book, I loved it. But what were you asking? SMITH: Well, you were not yet a "feminist," but of course there were things that were percolating. NOW [National Organization for Women] was formed in 1966. NOCHLIN: Was it that early? I never heard of it until I came back from Europe, in '69, when I heard of feminism for the first time, the new feminism. But I had a very 64 mixed vision. I utterly separated intellectual, artistic, and activist women out from other women, for whom I had great contempt. I always felt totally alienated from very feminine women. You know, little tweetie housewives, little brown wrens . . . ladies and stuff. I hated them. I really felt that they were the enemy, even more than men. It's like Jews who don't behave well. If you're a Jew; you get more mad at them almost than at anti-Semites, because they're giving you a bad name, or making you seem like part of their transgression. I and my friends were just so different, in a way. Little did we know how much we were really connected to those women. But I certainly felt a great antipathy to a certain domestic, feminine type. SMITH: Now you did say you had an antipathy to domesticity, and yet you were married — NOCHLIN: Oh, I love marriage, yes. You see, I think it's such a mistake to equate marriage with conventional domesticity. Think D. H. Lawrence. He loved to iron shirts, that was his big thing, and bake bread. I don't think they're the same thing at all. I adore my family. I always have. I am intensely close to my children. I was close to my husbands. I had two wonderful husbands. But I am not domestic. I don't like twittering around. The idea of packing a man's suitcase, or buying a man's clothes. All those little demeaning, domestic things. Or spending too much time paying attention to the household. Boring. Whereas, I love my children, I love being with them; they're people. It's not domesticity, it's something else. 65 DAISY POMMER [Nochlin's daughter]: What did you want to know? NOCHLIN: 1 wanted to know when Mary McCarthy wrote The Group. POMMER. Wasn't that in the fifties? NOCHLIN: Well, here's the other expert. Yes, I think so, too. We'll look it up. SMITH: Okay, well, why don't we end for today. NOCHLIN: Okay 66 SESSION TWO; 16 APRIL, 1998 [Tape III, Side One] SMITH: I wanted to ask you if you had any thoughts about what we discussed yesterday, and you obviously do. NOCHLIN: Did you want me to repeat them? SMITH: Yes, if you could. NOCHLIN: I have some questions to ask you, that I've thought about. First of all, why did they send a male interviewer to interview a leading feminist, and self-declared feminist art historian? It's not that I'm against it at all, and I think you're a terrific interviewer, because you just let me babble on and direct me in subtle ways, but 1 feel I have to protect myself more. I'm not going to reveal too many weaknesses to you, which I might to a friendly woman. I can't talk about my infatuation with clothes and dress and fashion, which are very central to my way of being and my way of presenting myself People always say, "Oh, my gosh, you have such wonderful clothes," and stuff like that. And I do, I spend lots of money on clothes, but that's not something I want to really toss around with a guy. With a woman, I'd talk about that. And there are other aspects of my life which I suppose I would keep more private with a man than with a woman. I'd be more defensive and more veiled, let's say. It's not that this is bad, but I think it should be kept in mind what the sex of the interviewer is vis-a-vis the interviewee, and that this, as in psychoanalysis now, 67 has something to do with transference. I think interviewing, in a very minor way, like psychoanalysis, has a lot of transference, which is the heart of psychoanalysis. It seems to me to be the central issue in psychoanalysis, not all the other things: whether you were really abused or not abused, and so on. I thoroughly agree with Freud that most people are not abused and this is childhood sexual fantasy that's being projected — although some people of course are abused. I think that element of the transference in an interview is still present, whether I see you as my father or my rival. I tend to see men even close to my age as rivals. T feel my antlers growing, etcetera, whereas with women I don't feel that way as much. I feel much more, "girls just gotta have fun." I really love women and I have fun with women and I tease them and flirt with them, and I usually don't have that aggressive quality. SMITH: Well, let's talk a little bit about fashion and dress. You know, I have asked people how they dressed at different stages in their lives. NOCHLIN: Okay. I would love to talk about that because it enters into my work, somewhat. I have always been interested in fashion, and when I was ten years old I published a little magazine which I did by hand, called The Stylemaster, which my mother carefully kept; I have everything from childhood put away in boxes, like Picasso, [laughter] That was when I was in Arizona. When I was twelve, when I graduated from Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, our final project was something called the Beautiful Book. This was a research 68 project which we started at the beginning of the eighth grade, and continued throughout We chose a topic, we then hand wrote and illuminated, with tempera paint, our research, and bound it in a leather cover. We learned how to do bookbinding as well as penmanship and draftsmanship. My book is really beautiflil; it was a history of fashion starting with the Egyptians and going right down to Hattie Carnegie, Valentina, and some of the famous designers of the early forties. My daughter has it. It's quite beautiful, actually; for a twelve-year-old it's incredibly impressive. My grandmother gave me a subscription to Vogue when I was quite young, and I really followed that very carefully. Now you may ask how somebody can be a leftist, an intellectual, a lover of Bach, and of fashion? Well, it's very easy. It's my aesthetic sense connected to a sense of self In the beginning it wasn't that I wore these clothes, it's that I identified w\xh them. I loved them, I thought that they were the most beautiflil things. I still do, up to a point. I am a little off mainstream fashion, I go for the Japanese much more. This has always been a major interest. There's a show on now at the Metropolitan Museum of forties and fifties American fashions, based around Claire McCardell, which is a very specific kind of fashion that I loved as a very young woman. I realize I'm just the age of Sylvia Plath, and I remember all the pictures of her, and what she was wearing. There were more interesting designers, like Claire McCardell, or Ann Fogarty. In a recent movie that 69 I'm in, I'm wearing one of my prized Ann Fogartys. They were New York fashions, they sure weren't what people elsewhere were wearing, like fuzzy angora sweaters and so on, but they were beautiful, that was the point: fitted close, flared skirts, they had a sort of ballet-like look, Ann Fogarty. I loved those fashions. Then, later on, I was more interested not so much in fashion, but in clothing. I wear a very specific kind of clothing. I wear a lot of dark, one-piece things with interesting jackets. 1 like jewelry. I feel one of the mistakes of the feminist movement in its early days was to to decry fashion and appearance, and I think later, second-wave feminism has realized what an error that was. Of course, one doesn't want to look like a nonentity; that would be death. But who are we? We are our surfaces. Nobody can really penetrate inside us; I don't even believe there is an inside. I, personally, am a combination of facets, of many, many outsides, and one of these outsides is what I wear. Now, there are people of amazing interest and brilliance and wonderfulness who don't dress in any particular way, but it's very hard not to dress as something. I remember Ti Grace Atkinson used to try to not dress as anything, but of course she came off as somebody who is trying not to dress as anything. Appearance is always out there. And while I wouldn't want to concentrate on that to the detriment of everything else, it's there, and it's important to me as an art historian and somebody who lives a lot through the visual. On the other hand, a beautiful voice, since I like 70 music, can counteract a whole realm of appearances. If somebody has a wonderful voice, a seductive voice, that is also important. What the person is saying or writing is very primary, too. But I don't discount these other things; I get great pleasure from them. SMITH: Have your tastes changed over the years? Has the way you dress changed? NOCHLIN: Yes, sure, as my body has changed and my age has changed. I no longer wear things with tight waists and flared skirts, which were fashionable in the forties and fifties, because I don't have a waist, [laughter] I tend to be more personal in my choices rather than fashionable, let's put it that way. But I still have an enormous interest in clothing, and looking at it, buying it, and talking about it. SMITH: And your friends, were they also interested in fashion? NOCHLIN: Some were, some weren't. It's been very variable. Most women like to talk about clothes somewhat and are interested in them. I have one friend who sometimes comes shopping with me, although on the whole I like to go myself It's a very personal thing. SMITH: Where do you like to go shopping? NOCHLIN: Bendels, is one place, Marimekko is another. I order a lot of things through the Joan Vass catalog, from Washington, for basics. Eileen Fisher for other kinds of basics. And then Issey Miyake for jackets. And I go to a place on the Upper West Side called Liberty House for little odds and ends. They have wonderful things. 71 I have a terrible weakness for sixties folksy, hand-painted things, like what I was wearing last night, which is from Bluefish, down in the Village. So it varies, but Marimekko, Bendels, Bergdorf s, Eileen Fisher, and Liberty House are my major sources. SMITH: Were you interested in Paris fashion? NOCHLIN: Yes. I liked . . what's her name, the one with the snaps — Anne-Marie Beretta. I used to like Issey Plantation, which you could get in Paris, which was more his sport line. No longer there. Anne-Marie Beretta on the rue St. Sulpice had lovely things. And Yohji Yamamoto, I really have a good collection of his things. And Issey on sale, if I can get it. I spend an enormous amount on clothes every year, but not on individual things; I like quantity, too. SMITH: How about your hair. How have you changed your hair? NOCHLIN: Well, I used to be a redhead, with lots of curly red hair. In my youth I wore it long, or in a braid, or two braids. Then I cut it short, like my daughter's hair. Did you notice my daughter's hair? SMITH: Yes. NOCHLIN: It was like that. Then I colored it until about two years ago, and I started having white sideburns, and then I let it go all white. SMITH: Why did you decide to let it go white? NOCHLIN: I got a skin cancer in the back of my ear. 72 SMITH: Oh NOCHLIN: Though they say it had absolutely nothing to do with hair dye. Probably more from the sun; even behind your ear it can happen, if you lie in a certain position. But I got a little wary, and my hair was beginning to look all faded and kind of weird. I got my red hair from my father's mother, who was strawberry blond, and her sister, and this other sister, my Aunt Rose, who was a redhead, but by the time I knew her it was out of a bottle and not a very good bottle. But she lived to a hundred, and she was a redhead till a hundred. I thought, "Oh my god, I'm beginning to look like Aunt Rose." I just didn't want to dye my hair anymore. My mother had beautiful white hair, and my grandmother had beautiful white hair, and I thought, "Underneath there is all this beautiful white hair." It doesn't look so beautiful now because of the chemo, but it really is very pleasant white hair. You know, there is a reason why the French in the eighteenth century powdered their hair: it's very kind to older faces, white hair. It's nicer to you if you have some wrinkles and stuff like that, it's softer. So I said to my hairdresser, "Let her go!" I saved money, and I can wear all different colors that I couldn't wear before, and I don't feel that I am looking like Aunt Rose with that tired hair. When I am not doing chemo my hair is very healthy and strong and robust. Of course I look older, too. But that's okay, I am older. SMITH: Were most of your friends professional women, or all of them? 73 NOCHLIN: I would say almost all. Artists, writers, art historians, people in English lit., history. Everyone, almost without exception. I cannot think of a single close friend of mine who has not got some related intellectual or philosophical interests; not one. My older daughter [Jessica Nochlin Trotta] is the only one, and I am intensely close to her. And I'm intensely close to my younger working daughter, but aside from my older daughter, whom I just adore, I really can't think of a single friend who is not an artist, a writer, or an academic. SMITH: This goes back to the fifties and sixties as well? NOCHLIN: 1 am trying to think. Yes. Some of my close friends are gallery owners, but they're right in the field. I am trying to think of anyone else. I am not even close to women lawyers or doctors. SMITH: So your network is all in the arts and letters? NOCHLIN: Utterly. My private life, my fun life, and my professional life are identical. They overlap. It's not that I'm close friends with all my colleagues, but I get on with them all. But my close friends are all people involved in things that interest me. SMITH: Prior to '69, when you had your Paul on the road to Damascus experience, did you and your friends have a sense of having a raw deal, or having to work against extreme unfairnesses? NOCHLIN: Yes, yes. One of my college roommates, I still remember, was teaching 74 English at Harvard during her graduate school and postgraduate days, and then when she came up for promotion everyone said, "Oh, what a pity, poor, Ann. She's the one who deserves the job at Harvard, but she's a woman." On the other hand, there were exceptions. I studied under Marjorie Hope Nicolson at Columbia. Columbia was obviously better about that. But there were no women at Yale that I remember. The so-called co-ed schools, as we quickly realized, were co-ed only in their student body; they were not co-educational in their faculty at all. We realized there was no provision made for childcare, so we helped each other out. Since my husband and I both worked we could afford — ha-ha — a steady babysitter, but in the society as a whole there was a real hostility to that. Thank god, I was based at Vassar where there was still a tradition and still encouragement, where half the art history department was women. But sure, we felt there was unfairness, and sure we talked about it, and sure I boiled at times, yes. SMITH: What about women within the art history field, within the CAA [College Art Association]? NOCHLIN: Well, there were far fewer in positions of power then. There were none at the male Ivy League colleges, obviously, which is the position of strength, or was, in art history at the time. There were none at the big state universities. I think of places like [the University of) Michigan, for example. There might have been the occasional one, often a wife, where nepotism rules didn't disallow that. But, on the 75 whole, even in art history, though it was known at Vassar as a major for debutantes, despite the fact that it was excellent, really, and despite the fact that at Vassar the head of the department was a woman, it was still a man's field. I think maybe there was one woman here at the Institute in Indian art, but not when I was here. There were no women at all. There were none in the art history department at Columbia. It was totally a man's field on the higher levels. Where the opportunity came was at the women's colleges. Just the same situation, I suppose, with black colleges. SMITH: It was 1951 when the first African American got a Ph.D. in art history. NOCHLIN: I'm sure. But it's not a field that appeals vastly to black scholars. They can do so much better in law, or medicine, or business — financially, especially. Why would they go into art history'!' And there's more of a tradition in black culture of musical interest and involvement rather than art per se. But I think it will change a bit. And it has changed. SMITH: Whether you are still officially a feminist or not, you still look at things differently, so I am wondering about the discussions that took place at Vassar, but also between you and other women who were in the field in one way or another. Did you talk about art and look at that art in a different way? NOCHLIN: No. I don't think so. No, we didn't. We were different people looking at art in different ways with different training. Maybe I chose a political subject partly because I was a woman, and as one of my fiiends said, "Linda, you are ornery." If 76 current belief is one thing, you'll always pull off the other. I think it's rabbinical atavism, because they always argued the Midrash, this way and that way, so you could see this side of it and that side of it, and I like that kind of thing. If one person takes one position I'll take the other. SMITH: Was this because of the dominance of formalism? NOCHLIN: Or iconography? I don't know. Maybe we had a little more interest in women generally. 1 know I wrote my first history paper in college about Beatrice Webb and Fabian socialism. It was no accident that I took Beatrice Webb So I was interested in women, up to a point, but I never thought of it as having a different kind of methodology or ideology. Until there's some sort of intellectual or ideological formation, it's very hard to think that way, and the first time I composed or constructed that formation was with "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" That's when I first asked those questions. But before that, though I was discontented, I got angry, and I felt there was injustice, I never thought of it in a totalizing, political way. I just thought, "I've got to fight this." SMITH: Were you getting angry about things in the art history field, or was it just society? NOCHLIN: No, about society, about society. And some of it turned on other women, who I felt were maintaining this, the ordinary women. Very unfair, but you can see why: I wanted to distinguish myself from women who submitted to what I 77 considered the degrading and boring role of washing dishes in Westchester. SMITH: Did it occur to you that you were probably getting paid less than you should be? Maybe at women's colleges everyone was paid less. NOCHLIN: Everyone was paid less, and I was on three-quarter time. Of course, I wasn't getting any benefits. But I quickly became full time, and I got an endowed chair almost immediately, so I wasn't paid so much less than a lot of people. That was not the real injustice. SMITH; What was the real injustice? NOCHLIN: The injustice earlier on was being part of a category in which I had to function as an exception rather than part of the supported social process. So that you always had to have double the energy. You had to do more in less time. There were all these constrictions on you and restrictions that impeded you from fully developing, and I had such terrific energy and drive and interest that often I was hardly aware of it, I just did what I had to do. I worked like a demon. I have enormous powers of focus and concentration when I am working. SMITH: You said yesterday that in school there was always this tension of doing well. Did that carry on as you were working through the academic ladder? NOCHLIN: Yes. It was this odd contradiction, because I absolutely was absorbed by what I was doing, but I was always worried about it, too. I think everyone feels somewhat like that, but I really felt that. I felt I really wanted to do this work; this 78 was the thing I really cared about, but was I doing it well enough? Always I was worried about that. SMITH: And how would you know? Or could you know? NOCHLIN: You don't know, you don't know. Most people are not going to tell you to your face. I've had good editors, though ,who have helped me round the bend sometimes. But I write well usually, and some things T do better than others. T can see that. My husband always was a good critic. I rose on the ladder, but I don't know what that means, because I know people who I don't think are very good who rose on the ladder, too. Sometimes, when I read things by younger scholars, I am blown away by their theoretical acumen and the richness of it, but I know theory, somewhat, and I've had a [Jacques] Lacan reading group and a Freud reading group, and I've read a lot of [Louis] Althusser, and less of [Jacques] Derrida. Althusser, because he's political. I've read all that stuff. [Roland] Barthes . . . I've read cover to cover the fashion things. I've read them all. But that's not how my mind works, except in certain situations. My piece about Courbet in the studio is probably my most theoretical work, and even that is not, strictly speaking, totally theoretical in the modern sense of theory. But what I have learned, talking about whether what I do is good or not, is I must do things in the way that seems plausible to me and that satisfies me; I can't be theoretical if that's not really the direction I want to go in. I've constructed myself to 79 go along with what one might call one's instincts or one's sense of self. That's all I can do, and 1 have to do it that way. SMITH: You had mentioned yesterday that between your two marriages you had lived with someone for some time, and I presume this is in Poughkeepsie, while you were at Vassar? NOCHLIN: Yes, mainly. SMITH: Given the mores of the time, did that cause any problems? NOCHLIN: Yes and no. Some problems, but — - SMITH: Were there intimations that this was not proper behavior for a professor at a women's college'^ NOCHLIN: Yes and no. It was not a major problem, however. SMITH: But you were always pressed to be discreet? NOCHLIN: Yes, and if I wasn't, I was told to be. But they were very open-minded. Sort of like in the army, I guess. What is it, don't tell — ? SMITH: Don't ask, don't tell. But according to [Michel] Foucault that means that incites people's interest, and it would seem to be what happened in the army. NOCHLIN: Yes, but Vassar College? What did they care? SMITH: Did you know women who had had abortions? NOCHLIN: Me. Two. That I'll be perfectly outspoken about. I've had two illegal abortions. One of which was right after college, and it was sort of expensive, but all 80 very well done. Vassar College had contacts. This was through a friend of mine who had had one, and she came and her husband came and my mother came and the young man in question came, and we all took a taxi to where another taxi, prearranged, picked us up and took us to the abortionist in Brooklyn. My mother sat with me and held my hand, because there were no anaesthetics. They wouldn't take that risk. I remember my nails, such as they are, went right through my mother's flesh. But he was perfectly nice. It was a nice doctor who wanted to make a little money and buy a house in Florida and he gave me prescriptions through a druggist who was in on the deal, and it was fine. The second time I was at Vassar and somebody had a number across the river and 1 drove there. The doctor was sort of scruffy, but on the other hand he gave me the same pills, he played the radio very loud to make up for the lack of my mother's presence, to drown out the groans of pain. But it was very quick, not that bad. T got up, drove home, and went to a party. SMITH: So no one took you, even? NOCHLIN: No, I went all by myself It was not that easy, I had to do a little looking around, and it was $500 each time. SMITH: A lot of money back then. NOCHLIN: Ah, boy. Well, my mother paid for them. She was absolutely marvelous about it and took it for granted. 81 SMITH: Now, the stereotype of that period's sexual mores was that nice girls didn't— NOCHLIN: Ha-ha-ha! Five of my friends had abortions in the early fifties, including one Roman Catholic. So don't believe it; it was just undercover and unpleasant and secretive and debasing, debasing. You were at their mercy, because they were very few. You knew they didn't want to get caught, so they'd do their best as far as that's concerned. The first one was a perfectly respectable nice doctor, the second one was obviously not very nice at all. But they did it, that's fine. I would have done it again if I'd had to. Loads of people had abortions. Perhaps even more in my circles, where single motherhood was not really an option the way it is today. There are a lot of people I know who want to have children even though they're not married. In those days, there was only one person that I knew who had done that overtly, just to have the children, and I remember being amazed by her. Mores have changed to such a degree, and it's hard to tell people what that's like, when we weren't allowed to have men in our rooms except with the doors open, and now we have co-ed dormitories. It's just an utter revolution; there has been a sexual revolution, there's no question about it. People live together all the time; it's expected. Nobody says a word Sexual partners get insurance. But what a revolution. It's amazing. SMITH: Were gays or lesbians open in Vassar? 82 NOCHLIN: Interesting, yes. SMITH: Given the situation then. NOCHLIN: They were pretty open. A lot of the women professors lived as couples, certainly But, again, it was not talked about. A lot of the students had crushes on younger women professors. When I was a house fellow the first time, after my first husband died, a big fliss was made about a supposed lesbian affair in our house, and one of the students was told to leave. But that's because her partner had a nervous breakdown If they had been quiet about it, and there were other people who were quiet about it, I don't think there would have been any fijss. The first year I was there a young woman jumped out of a tower of the north building and killed herself because of a lesbian affair. It was amazing because there were people among the faculty, certainly, who went on having lesbian affairs year after year with total aplomb, without talking about it, but everyone knew they were a couple. But then there were young girls who really thought this was the most horrendous, sinful thing that could happen, including, obviously, this woman who committed suicide. Suicide, for a lesbian affair. Mores have changed now. There's the Lesbian Alliance, and the gay this and that. What a wonderful change. That people should not feel shame for their sexual preferences seems to me to be one of the greatest revolutions of all time. Of course, I suppose its forbidden nature added a little spice to the whole thing, too, but I still 83 think that's a great, great revolution. Wonderful. So it was both ways. Some people could go right on doing it, and other people, if they didn't bear up under it, you see, if they showed signs of hysteria or a breakdown, then people moved in. There were gay people there, too. There could have been trouble, but if one conducted oneself with discretion — One of my friends, during my first year of teaching, was arrested on the eve of his marriage by a jealous wife who thought he was having an affair with her husband. And she accused him of molesting their son. A detective came and arrested him and led him off before his wedding. So things happened then, too. There was a lot of sexual hanky-panky going on, 1 must say. There was adultery, and a lot of male faculty making out with women and holding high grades up as lures. Oh yes. SMITH: So you think that happened at Vassar? NOCHLIN: T know it happened. I don't think it happened, I know it happened. Not to me, but to some of my students who came to me and talked about it. SMITH: And were there avenues for redress? NOCHLIN: One of the main malefactors was forced to leave immediately. Immediately. But I suppose there were timid students who never really said anything about it. I think a lot of those faculty preyed on students, married ones, too. It's not fantasy, it happened. SMITH: What did you think about Vassar going co-ed? 84 NOCHLTN: Oh, I was very much against it at the time, because it coincided exactly with the women's movement. What an irony: at the moment that women begin to fight for their power and their voice, suddenly there's one less place for a woman editor of a newspaper, one less place for a woman electrician, and so on. Automatically it means that no matter how egalitarian it is, women don't have all the chances anymore. Well, this is true and not true, but I think to some degree Vassar has been one of the most successful in maintaining a certain kind of equality, letting women speak their voices. I think a lot of gay men applied in the beginning. I know a few of my friends' sons who were not gay went there and they said it was heaven on earth There weren't that many straight men and there were a lot of women looking for men. They just loved every minute, they just were kings. I have had excellent male students, before and after, whom I am friends with. SMITH; So it wasn't a factor in your deciding to leave? NOCHLIN: No, because I went to someplace that was co-ed. I wanted graduate students — that's why I left. I went to CUNY [City University of New York]. I wanted to be in New York. And my daughter Daisy, the one you met, wanted to go to school in New York. She didn't like the schools up there. So it was a happy move, but it was certainly not because it was co-ed. I had had enough; I didn't want to teach there and live and die there; it just seemed too much. SMITH: You have written about the '69 seminar on women and art, and T wanted to 85 get a sense of whether the social movements of the sixties had already begun to change student-faculty relationships at Vassar. Did the antiwar movement and black power have an impact on how people were talking to each other and what was considered important? NOCHLIN: Yes. All those things had an impact. The formality of student-teacher relations was reduced, and there was much more of a sense of shared power, I would say. And that first class, as I write about in Starting From Scratch, was a really democratic class. 1 knew more than most of the students, generally, but some of them became much more expert on specific issues and specific women artists. It was a very open class, as was the one I taught at Stanford, where people brought in items of their grandmothers' lingerie and we went down to the porn shops in San Francisco; low art began entering the scene, even in the first seminar. One woman, I think it was Ann Northrup looked into how women were represented in television advertising, popular photography, etcetera. You had to look into other areas because the visual culture was so rich and had so many different kinds of positions for women. So, yes, that certainly made the relationships different. SMITH: Was there a lot of antiwar activity on the campus? Were there disruptions such as those at Columbia? NOCHLIN: Not quite that bad, but I was at Columbia in '68, and I participated in antiwar activity there. At the end of it I was asked to become a member of the 86 faculty. SMITH: And? NOCHLIN: I accepted. I was an associate professor at Columbia for a brief moment, and then Dick and I decided to get married and I gave it up. SMITH: Because he was back at Vassar. NOCHLIN: Yes. Nowadays, a commute from Columbia to Vassar would be considered nothing. I could have done it easily. But I'm just as glad, because it meant we were both on board. I wanted another child, and we lived right on the campus. I could go home for lunch, he could go home for lunch. We were right there with our child. I like that. I know there are these heroic women now who commute with children and nannies, but I think I did the right thing. They gave me a free one-year honeymoon fellowship and an endowed chair when I came back to Vassar. So that was fine. But sometimes I regret it. [Tape III, Side Two] NOCHLIN: I was active at Columbia in '68, and I was active at Vassar. At Vassar, I participated in a march down the main street of Poughkeepsie, and a lady took a pot shot at me with her umbrella. A very old lady! [laughter] It was a little scary to see the violence, to see that somebody would actually physically assault me as I marched with my rather, what's that word, raggle-taggle group of about twenty-five. Maybe it was more than that. But I marched on Washington; I was one of the people who 87 went to that famous march on the justice department, which was an experience beyond belief. All these people were there; I can't remember who they were but they were famous. I remember when we got to the justice department, a black member of our group walked up to one of the people working there and said, "Hey, man, why are you wearing that tight coat and that tie and that collar? Don't you feel uncomfortable?" He was saying, "Relax. Stop being part of the establishment, join us." Again, it was a sort of illumination. This was a march on mores, on how you were, how you dressed, how you conceived of the self. That's what it was; it wasn't just political. Then we marched right up to the machine guns, or whatever those guys had, at the Pentagon We were told to wear dignified dress, however. Ladies. SMITH: Really"^ NOCHLIN: That's it, it was kookie. And we were told not to wear earrings because hostile people could pull them out of your ears. SMITH; Well, yes. NOCHLIN: I walked right up to the drawn machine guns of . . . now I think of them as little boys, these soldiers, and we put flowers into their guns, and we walked home. It was quite an experience, very adrenaline-producing. So I was right there for that. We wrote letters, we did all sorts of things. But that was the big activist moment. SMITH: You said your seminar on women in art was very democratic, but what about your earlier seminars? You must have done seminars on nineteenth- 88 century French art; might they not have been democratic as well? NOCHLIN: No Not in the same degree. I am not a totally "egalitarian" teacher. I think that's an abdication of what you are there for. It's like being pals, or brother and sister with your children. Though I strongly, and I want this recorded, differentiate between parenting and being a professor. I do not want to mother any of my students and I never do I am very strict about that. I don't want to mess around in their private lives, 1 don't want to overcomfort them. I love a lot of my students and we're friends and we go to the theater together and we go to fiinny movies together, we go and see art shows together. I took my whole seminar to Chicago for a day to see the late Degas show, a real experience. We went down to Philadelphia to see Cezanne together. But to confuse motherhood, or fatherhood, and teaching I think is the biggest error there can be. I think these are totally disparate roles, or at least partially disparate, it's a very dangerous thing to confuse either loverhood, parenthood, or whatnot with teaching. I think teaching is a very specific activity, and state of being, and role. Martin Buber wrote a wonderful article about the teacher. And, at Yale, Shoshana Felman also wrote a remarkable article about the specificity of teaching. There's a wonderful book by my favorite Japanese author [Natsume Soseki], whose name 1 never remember, called Kokoro. It's about a teacher and the relation of the student to a sense!. 89 I have brilliant students. I teach just graduate students, and I am the luckiest teacher in the whole world. I have people who are as interested in the field as I am, and that's pretty exciting. And this is a very selective place. We get four hundred applications for forty places, and a vast plurality are in modem, so we have the pick of the crop. But I do think it's an abdication of one's responsibility to be quote, "totally democratic." And it's hypocritical too; we have the power to grade them, we have the power to recommend them. One cannot hypocritically pretend that we're all on the same level. And they know less than I do, for the most part. They may be as intelligent or more intelligent than I am, but they do know less, and I know more, and part of my job is really to impart that more, both in terms of methodology and in terms of material and knowledge and guidance, and criticism. 1 have to be critical. I can't just be supportive, that would again be an abandonment of responsibility. So, no, I'm not a totally democratic teacher; I don't think that's what teachers are about. I think there's a place for democracy in government, and in the social world, but teaching is not democratic, and shouldn't be. SMITH: You wrote that you developed the vantage point of "otherness." NOCHLIN: Yes SMITH: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about what "otherness" meant to you then and what it continues to mean to you now. Did it start as a psychoanalytic concept, or was it simply a sense of difference? 90 NOCHLIN: Ornery-ness. [laughter] If they said it was black I wanted to say it was white. Partly. But partly it was because I think as a strategy, otherness — Well, my mother's father always thought that being a Jew gave one that position, of being somewhat outside of the mainstream, and hence being able to criticize it and look at the social or literary or cultural order critically. He was against the founding of the state of Israel because he felt that would make Jews just like everyone else: people with a nation to defend, a lack of objectivity, being as cruel and arbitrary as other nations. He hated nationalism. Above all, because it would deprive Jews of their outsiderhood, which he felt was such an advantage, and I feel that, too. Being a woman, being a Jew. Of course, it's hard when you are a success. I can't be hypocritical; am I an outsider when I am teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts? This is probably one of the most desirable jobs in the world, teaching fabulous graduate students. But, yes, you can be an insider institutionally, but I think you have to watch out for being seduced and grabbed up by too compromising a position, even here. I still say we need a black scholar. Of course we always get plenty of Asian students, so they can always say we have those, and we have a lot of Hispanic students because we have a wonderfijl Hispanic program here — a lot of people interested in Spanish and Latin American and Hispanic culture in general. So that's all to the good, fine. The odd thing is, T really hate dissension and fighting. I am a very good 91 arbitrator, I can smooth things down and get what I want without creating a ruckus, but that's probably because I hate fighting so much. My parents fought a lot. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was neurotic about it, and I'm sure that's the reason that I absolutely want to steer clear of any personal, ad hominem, ad feminine kind of fighting. I generally don't let on when I'm angry. I play it close to the chest. That probably results in people whom I really don't like at all thinking I like them, which is a lot of trouble, but it keeps life a little calmer. I get what I want, usually, if I really want it. But one has to be wary of letting oneself be totally absorbed by the institution. It becomes difficult. Still, there are always opportunities for opposition, for outsider thinking, even if you're not an actual outsider, and I try to keep that position. SMITH: In your essay on orientalism ["The Imaginary Orient," in The Politics of Vision], I was impressed how you engaged [Edward] Said's argument to bring it back to the specific political relationships that were at play. NOCHLIN: Yes, very much so, in France in the nineteenth century; I also did a big piece on the Sepoy mutiny in art [Lecture, "Sex and the 'Sepoy Mutiny': The Intersection of Race and Gender in Colonialist Imagery" CAA, February, 1987], unpublished — I have tons of unpublished stuff — which I gave at the College Art Association, to show how that was represented in England. I was asked by the Royal Anthropological Society to write an article from an art historian's point of view on a 92 group of ethnographic photographs of North Africa from the Budgett-Meakin Collection, which is a famous collection, and I did [Lecture, "Late Nineteenth- Century Anthropological Photographs from the Budgett-Meakin Collection of the Royal Anthropological Institute" International Center of Photography, March, 1987]. I gave them as lectures and I wrote them up, and then the project collapsed, so they were never published. Nor can T really publish those pictures, T guess. I should some time. But that was interesting, too, to see how photography works with that discourse of otherness. I have really been very interested in that. SMITH: How has that kind of insistence on the immediate ideological and political relationships as opposed to the discursive formation worked out in terms of your thinking about representation of women? NOCHLIN: I don't know exactly what you are saying. SMITH: Well, in the sense that you challenge the argument that there is a single orientalist way of seeing, that then flattens out how the — NOCHLIN: Oh, I see what you mean, yes. I don't think that all representations of nudes have the same discursive implications at all. This very much feeds into part of my film program. Richard Rogers, from Harvard, made an hour-long film on Olynipia, the painting, and I'm in it, as a talking head. That was a revolutionary picture. By now of course it has gone up into the heaven of "the great masterpiece," and it's lost all its impact. But at the time it was revolutionary, even though the salon 93 was bursting with nude women pictures. But the formal structure, the iconography — I early on wrote a piece about how I thought that both Olympia and the Dejeuner sur I'herhe were magnificent parodies, blagties — I tie them into the whole notion of blagueries. So that's one kind of nude, which is, you might say, the anti-institutional nude, antiseductive, etcetera, and I think that's true of many of Picasso's nudes. I think there can be revolutionary nudes, too. The question always arises, for instance, about the uses of allegory, and I've written about allegory, where woman is a signifier for something else, like virtue, or liberty, or whatever. I read Erving Goffman, who was an absolutely splendid writer, wonderful. I invited him to speak at CUNY and he died right before [he was to come], so 1 never met him, but I feel I know him somehow. He wrote a book called Gender Advertisements, which was a picture book where he analyzes not the underlying content, not what the ad is supposed to be advertising, but the gender relationships exhibited within the ad itself — the unconscious ones. The man is always higher, he's facing front, the woman is leaning toward him. It's an ad for soap, but nevertheless that's how it is. I try to do the same thing with Delacroix's Liberty and Daumier's Republic, to show that the meaning of the piece as woman, i e. as sigtiifier, is always of equal importance if not more important than the meaning of woman as signified. By those standards, Delacroix's Liberty is a very activist, energetic, almost scary woman; 94 people were afraid to show it at certain moments in history, partly because it shows woman in such an unaccustomed position, even though she's a partly allegorical woman. Whereas Daumier's Republic, which is always touted as the wonderfijl image of democracy shows this nursing mother with two rather large boys lunging for her breasts, it's the people nursing the breasts of the Republic, but what is it? It's a woman being assaulted by two little guys. And out of that I developed a whole interpretation of Daumier's antifeminism, which was strong. He did three series of totally hysterically funny antifeminist cartoons, Les Divorceuses, Les Bas-B/eus, and something else. At the same time, the only women who he thinks worthy of being depicted positively are working-class women, little mothers, etcetera, etcetera. So I am trying to say that women can be depicted in all different kinds of ways, but one mustn't forget the importance of the signifier; one must not just read through the signifier, but read it as it appears on the surface. I think there are nudes and nudes. Is a Paula Modersohn-Becker nude antiwoman? No, of course it's not. I think all those salon nudes are stereotypical degradations, that's all. I think Manet is saying something very different. I think Renoir, when he turned out all those bloated bathers, which he did by the ton, lost something. I thought he was a wonderful painter before that. And I like his very late, hot pink, pneumatic nudes because they are so excessive, over the top. Just to get back to your original question, which I seem to have been moving 95 away from, it's so complicated, because originally, let's say, in the Renaissance through the baroque, and even the eighteenth century to some degree, it was the male nude that was the thing that male artists had to prove themselves with. In the time when history painting was primary, the test piece for getting into, say, the Academy at Rome was the male nude; the female nude was almost tangential. There's a wonderful book by Abigail Solomon-Godeau called Male Trouble: A Crisis in Interpretation, it shows the way the male nude was feminized during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century so that women were almost disappeared from the scene, to some degree, in favor of these ambiguous male nudes. In a way, you could say that it's at the middle of the century, with the mass production of photography and a new salon public, that the female nude comes into her own, so that now when we think of the word nude we think it has to be a woman. Certainly that would never have been true before the middle of the nineteenth century. So we're talking about a very specific historical formation, really, when the female nude is all, and it also is a moment of commodity culture, the moment when the spectacular society comes into being. It's vastly overdetermined, when that shift takes place. SMITH: Overdetermined? NOCHLIN: Overdetermined by many, many coincidental factors. You can't say it's one thing. 96 SMITH: Had you been asking yourself, prior to '69, why were there were no women artists? NOCHLIN: Never. You know how it happened? I may want to delete this. Somebody famous . . . was it Gloria Steinem? I can't remember. Some famous feminist came up to talk at a Vassar graduation, maybe it was in '69. I was a friend of a woman named Brenda Feigen, and T knew her brother Richard Feigen, who had brought some artists up to visit. He was a famous gallery person, the Richard Feigen Gallery. But then he was just starting out. After whoever this was talked — I think it was Gloria Steinem — Richard turned to me and said, "Linda, I want to show women artists in my gallery, but, tell me, why have there been no great women artists?" He actually asked me that question. And when he asked me that question I started thinking about it. SMITH: So he was dismissing O'Keeffe, Frankenthaler? NOCHLIN: No, he was talking about the past. He was showing more Renaissance stuff. But maybe he was thinking of the present, too. There is no Michelangelo, there is no Raphael. I don't even think there's a Manet or a Cezanne. No, it's true, perfectly true. But my feeling is, are we only going to look at great art? What a bore! I think there's a case to be made not for bad art but for non-great art, other kinds of art, interesting art. SMITH: Well, if you want to understand a period you have to look at a much 97 broader range. NOCHLIN: Yes, you don't have to look too long at the Salon. I'm not for forgetting that part of art history is value. Do you want to listen to music that's horrible? I mean, all these cultural studies things. They're fun, but to have to really listen and look at all that crap and think about it. I like it for nonthinking. I read mysteries by the ton, but I sure wouldn't want to have to work on the mystery. I want that for pleasure, I don't want to think. 1 want popular culture for relaxation, I don't want to strain my brain on it. It's not worth it, I don't think. But I think people who have been oppressed and left out suffer from that. There are no great women presidents of the United States: because they weren't presidents of the United States, women can't be president. There are great women writers, to a much greater extent it seems to me than there are women painters of that stature. That's partly because you can do it at home, and you can just sit in your room. You don't need a studio, you don't need assistance, you don't need a certain position. I think, again, there are complex reasons. So that question made me think, because, first of all, it implied there were no great women artists. Second of all, because it assumed this was a natural condition. It just lit up my mind. 1 wrote that article as though inspired. I knew where to go. Everything I touched fed into it. When my husband read it, he said, "This is the greatest piece you have ever written or ever will write." He was a big admirer. 98 [laughter] As I was of him. But it was written under the pressure of the occasion, which 1 think is very important. I think a lot of important work is done under the pressure of that particular historical circumstance, and you're never going to do anything quite like that again. Maybe the Courbet piece had some of that, but already it's a little nostalgic and theoretical. I still remember it. I don't think I could ever write that again; it had to be then at the heart of the movement, at the beginning, inventing, using everything. I used Piaget, I used Kris and Kurz, I used anything that could feed into it. SMITH: Did you join or help form a women's consciousness-raising group at that time"^ NOCHLIN: I went to some sessions, yes. And to some degree, they came out of the classes that I did. 1 did go, I didn't exactly join, but I went. I found them helpful and revealing. But then a little monotonous, because everyone was discovering roughly the same thing. You could stay home and talk to your friends and discover these things, too. But I talked to a lot of women in groups, and I went to the Wingspread Conference, which was one of the really formative women's meetings at the very beginning of the movement. I met women in other fields, like Perry Miller Adato, who then changed to making films about women artists. There was another early conference in Washington, and then I went to one of the very first meetings of feminist professors and intellectuals. It was really early in 99 '69, and it was down in some public school on Thirtieth Street, and our group, which was arts and literature, consisted of three nuns, Elaine Showalter, and me. [laughter] We always talk about that with great nostalgia. It was an exciting time. Ideas were popping, people were coming up with new things, women were interacting and exchanging ideas and grievances, and it was an absolutely marvelous moment, I think; energetic and to the point. SMITH; Were your friends also changing at the same time, or were you making new sets of friends? NOCHLIN: Most of my friends were changing too, yes. It was a transformative moment. 1 met new people, but also the people I knew were changing. SMITH: 1 think you came to England in 72, if I'm recalling right, and that was transformative for Griselda Pollock in the sense that even though she was already a feminist, it wasn't clear to her how one would apply that to art history. NOCHLIN: Right, I spoke at the Courtauld, where I was received by the faculty like something that smelled bad. They were very polite and very nice, because I was already a fairly well-known scholar for my work on Courbet and realism, but I gave a talk on women artists, and that did not go over with them. With the students, like Griselda and Rosie [Rozsika Parker] and some of the other people, sure, absolutely. SMITH: What about art historians in the U.S.? NOCHLIN: Yes and no. I heard some people talk behind my back once, saying, 100 "Don't let Linda Nochlin hear that." There's a tendency of course to make me into a caricature of myself, like I'm an ax-wielding feminist with no sense of the beauty of art, which couldn't be more untrue. But that argument was a little hard to pull off because I work so closely with the objects, and I'm very smart — and nuanced. Forceful but nuanced. I don't make blanket statements: "Get rid of all the nudes!" or something like that. I try and distinguish between the ways nudes signify. But sure, I met plenty of hostility on the part of male art historians who were more conservative, and some more conservative female ones, too. SMITH: Were you involved with developing a women's caucus, or a feminist caucus atCAA? NOCHLIN: In the beginning, yes. I let younger people do that; that doesn't interest me. SMITH: Did you try to balance your academic work with, say, general political movements, like the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a major issue at the time? NOCHLIN: No, I just did what I was interested in and thought I could do. I have always been as they say, productive. I write a lot. 1 never found that was a division; I felt it was part of the same thing in a different form. SMITH: At the same time you were starting to read Althusser and Levi-Strauss. How did that fit into this picture? Althusser is somewhat misogynist. NOCHLIN: Oh, I wasn't interested in who he was, I was interested in his work, 101 especially Pour Marx, the thing about interpellation and positioning; that seemed to me utterly central. Now, you can think of it in many different ways, but that was a very important text in my development in my thinking. When I was a kid, all criminals (this was totally untrue) were Irish and Italian. We never heard of black or Hispanic criminals. But there were certain, you might say, positions of criminality that need to be filled in all societies. And different groups are interpellated at different times. I think he's absolutely right: the Irish and the Italians went off to the suburbs and stopped being natural criminals. Everyone said they were natural criminals. The Mafia's there, sure, but let's take the Irish: they were all tough gangs that beat up people. Gone, with the wind! Now criminals are almost without exception, at least in New York, black or Hispanic. This seems to me perfect Althusserian logic: there are a certain number of places reserved for criminals and different groups are interpellated at different times. It's not just chance and it's not nature, and it's not simply institutional structures who decide which and when. I thought that whole idea of interpellation was really major, because it worked so well with women, too. Are women natural dishwashers? No. Or are they even natural nurturers? It's more debatable, isn't it, because here they come with breasts and all that equipment. But he made me really rethink a lot of ways I had looked at the world, so 1 thought he was very important. SMITH: In '71 you also publish "Museums and Radicals [: A History of 102 Emergencies"], so your interest in the politics of art is continuing. The conclusion of that article focuses on the Cuban poster, which of course had some prominence in the U.S. Did you travel to Cuba? NOCHLIN: No, unfortunately I never did. I wish I had, but 1 didn't. But I was interested in the poster movement there, which I thought was very strong and very interesting. SMITH: What about your activities in terms of developing women's art? Aside from observing, and being supportive? NOCHLIN: Yes, I did the Women Artists show. SMITH: Yes, but I'm thinking more in terms of Judy Chicago, Womanhouse, and the Women's Building phenomenon. NOCHLIN: Well, you know my opinions from "Starting from Scratch." I thought it was a very enterprising and interesting movement, very important for women artists of the period, though I deeply disagreed with some of the essentialist ideas: women are going to like lace and pattern, and so on. But I can see women quite consciously taking on those signs of femininity and transforming them into a new kind of art. I was also surprised at the passivity and timidity of a lot of the women I met, who needed so much support and nice-nice and hand holding and patting, and so on. I was used to Vassar women, who weren't like that. I went out with a guy from UCLA when I was in high school, the first three 103 years of college, and then a little later, and I introduced a lot of my friends to his male friends, and they kept saying, "You are such high-powered women." We didn't just sit and listen to them; we argued, we fought, we talked among ourselves. They had never met anyone like us, and we thought we were what women were. Then we realized that there were many women who hadn't had that privilege of being listened to, of being encouraged to express opinions, of caring deeply about some subject, and not just getting a man or making themselves attractive to men. I think there was a real place for Womanhouse; I just ultimately parted ways because of what I thought of as essentialist thinking. I think what Judy Chicago did was very important I think The Dinner Table was important not as a work of art but as a shrine, or a kind of mythic space that a lot of women could feel a great identity with. Even though the vagina of Queen something-or-other was nothing that inspired me, you could see that women felt a deep identity with this — not, I think, on the level of art, but more on the level of religion, almost, of a shrine, of a place which to them they could set their being, their essence at. But that's not my sort of thing. SMITH; With your article, "How Feminism in the Arts Can Implement Cultural Change," what would you change in the argument? NOCHLIN: You know, I can't remember that article; it's terrible, I haven't read it in a long time. But I think that feminism as a viewpoint can change everyone's way of looking at art; I don't think it's for women explicitly, though some of it is. I think it 104 should make men rethink, make everyone rethink the givens, the conventional attitudes and unexamined attitudes one has toward the work of art and toward the institutions of art. That's what I mean when I say it can effect cultural change. I don't think feminism is just for women; I think it's a viewpoint, and a political process which everyone should be interested in. SMITH: Already in that article you are explicitly criticizing essentialist femininity. NOCHLIN: Yes, right, and I continue to. SMITH: Which was important to a major strand of female modernism. NOCHLIN: Yes, though Georgia O'Keeflfe would certainly deny it. She was outraged. But she absorbed it, I suppose, in some ways. Sure, it was important . . . people like Anais Nin, that ninny, whom I detest. But it really deserves examination. I don't think anyone has worked on the construction of essentialist ideas at the fin de siecle and the early twentieth century. I think Rodin was involved in them; Rodin had a lot of women supporters and admirers who felt he sexually liberated them in his work. I think D. H. Lawrence is a very interesting case in point; I have a mixed reaction to him. On the one hand, I think he was very freeing; one of his favorite activities was ironing, he loved to do housework. He felt free to do that. I think some of his ideas about women are preposterous, but he's also part of this whole notion that women have some kind of sexual nature which defines them and which 105 has been repressed by Victorian society and needs to come out. I think there is a dialectic between that notion and notions of liberation. On the one hand, women have a sexual power and it needs to be liberated from prudery, and on the other hand you have the suffragettes, most of whom, except for Victoria Woodhull, are very repressive sexually; they don't even talk about it. They talk about rights and they talk about a whole lot of other things, but they sure are not pressing for sexual liberation, except for Victoria Woodhull and some of the French people associated with Saint-Simonianism. You might say there's a dialectic there which finally sprouts into both aspects, commingled in the women's liberation movement. But I think that essentialism, though 1 disagree with it, is very important as a strand, as a precursor, as a thesis-antithesis kind of thing. SMITH: You have written about the Women Artists [1550-1950] show, so we don't need to repeat all of that, but I'm interested in what you learned from doing that show, and how it may have changed the way you approached other problems, further on. NOCHLIN: Some people saw a contradiction between "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists," and my curating this show, but I entirely disagree, because I think there were amazing and wonderful artists that were uncovered, or brought together for the first time in that show. Also, it was interesting, because Ann 106 [Sutherland Harris] and I traveled all through Europe and this country, and some curators, especially in Europe, were positively insulting. Women artists? Why do you want to look at them? Others were wonderfully encouraging. Richard Morphet at the Tate Gallery, couldn't have been more excited. He brought out canvas after canvas, and was all gung ho for this. But what was interesting about some of those negative curators was that two years later they were having shows of women artists in their collections; it was really amazing. There was one canvas, supposedly by a famous male artist of the early nineteenth century, which had been offered to the museum in Berlin at an enormous price, but it turned out to be by his female assistant. The price plummeted and they bought it. It's a wonderful picture. But, isn't that marvelous, that the minute it turned out to be by a woman artist, not by the famous male artist — Boing! — the price went right down. Then I found out what it meant to so many women, that show. There are still women who come up to me and say, "You know, that show changed my life, It showed that we had a past, we had a tradition." [Tape IV, Side One] SMITH: How might you do that show differently today, if you were to do it again? NOCHLIN: I don't know. I never thought of doing it again. I think I'd do it roughly very much the same. 107 SMITH: But if you were to do a show that continued into the twentieth century. NOCHLIN: It did continue into the twentieth century; it ended in 1950. Who would I put in? SMITH: Right. NOCHLIN: People are always asking me that and I just won't say. But Louise Bourgeois would certainly be a major figure, and Eva Hesse. There was a wonderful show curat ed by Elizabeth Murray at MOMA, of work from the MOMA collection. I led a panel discussion about it. It was simply amazing how much good work was turned up in that show. I would have liked to have seen a centennial show at MOMA of their women artists, or twentieth-century women artists, but this was not greeted with glad cries of glee or anything. That would be really terrific, to have all of twentieth-century women artists. I don't know if anyone's doing it. I would have loved to have, but it's too late now. SMITH: Here you are in the middle of New York and you have the Met, of course, with which you have a formal relationship, and you have the Whitney and MOMA and the Guggenheim. Do you advise them? Do people come to you and say, "Linda, what should we do about x, y, and 2, realist art, or women's art?" NOCHLIN: Not really. They ask me to talk a lot and to be on panels. I am going to be in a panel on Chuck Close at MOMA in two weeks. I've spoken on Picasso . . . I'm at MOMA a lot. Individual curators ask me stuff, sure. I go a lot to galleries, I'm 108 interested in contemporary art, and young artists. I write a lot of catalog essays, mainly for women artists: Mary Frank, Cora Cohen, Catherine Murphy, Judy Pfaff, I've done a lot of them. SMITH: In recent years you edited the book, 77?^ Jew in the Text [with Tamar Garb], and you've been writing more on late nineteenth-century French art. What led you into those directions, and how have they built on your feminist turn? NOCHLIN: Well, the major thing I've done in terms of Judaism is "Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite," and that got me interested in the whole notion of Jews in art and as represented in art, so I did the text with Tamar Garb, who is one of my dearest friends and one of the best art historians of the modern period. I was interested for very similar reasons. Then I did a little piece in Too Jewish, also, an introduction. While the Dreyfus affair was a very specific political situation, how it was represented in art and what impact it had on Degas I thought was important. In some ways, I have taken a very similar stance about Jews and Jewishness, but, again, based on the specificity of that experience, and the Holocaust and so on, yes. SMITH: How did the teaching job at CUNY develop? NOCHLIN: Through Milton Brown. I gave a talk at his retirement symposium, on the Paterson Strike pageant. I got very interested in pageants at that moment and did a lot of research on the pageant movement in general, but especially Paterson, which 109 was organized by John Reed, who later went on to reenact the storming of the Winter Palace in the Russian Revolution. There was a whole pageant movement, and there were lots of publications, Vassar has loads of them, so I went down and gave the talk. At that moment I had been up for a job at Berkeley, where I was competing against Robert Herbert, T. J. Clark, and other people, and I got the job. I thought, "Oh, how wonderful!" I wanted to go there. My friend Svetlana [Alpers] said, "Oh, accept it. Your husband and kids will come around," and so on, so I accepted it. Of course, my husband and my daughter both said they'd rather die on the spot than live in California. So after they got me the cheap mortgage rate and put me in the catalog, I had to pull out. Very embarrassing. But just at that moment came CUNY with an offer. Apparently, they had been looking at me. I had taught at Hunter a bit. T used to do a master's level class at Hunter in the seventies, which was wonderful, I loved that. We'll have to talk about that. But Milton Brown asked me if I'd come to CUNY, and I said yes, and we moved to New York. That's what happened. SMITH: And what did your husband do? NOCHLIN: He commuted to Vassar. He was very happy to move to New York, he wanted to. He commuted to Vassar, and then he got the job at the Institute. This was his office; this was his chair. He had brain cancer. This was his chair when he was dying. So we moved to New York, and my daughter went to the Brearley School and everyone was happy. I loved CUNY. It was wonderful the years when I 110 was there . . . the brilliance of the students and the faculty. Of course, there was fighting like hell, but still it was wonderfiil, really sparkling years. I think I have to stop. SMITH: Okay. Ill SESSION THREE: 14 MAY, 1998 [Tape V, Side One] SMITH: Have any thoughts come to you in the past month about things you had wished you had said, or that you wanted to get on the record? NOCHLIN: No, I didn't really think of those things. I've been working on a paper on horses in art, and it has just absorbed me to the hilt. SMITH: Nineteenth-century French horses? NOCHLIN: Yes. The whole change in the position of the horse in the nineteenth century: ontologically, because of evolution, and epistemologically, because of photography. There are wonderful books coming out now, too, on the evolution of the horse, but not so much on the meaning of the horse. That's what really interests me: the allegorical and ideological issues, like the whole idea of race and the horse. I don't mean horse racing; I mean the typology of the horse and its relationship to racist theories, the social understanding of the horse. So I've gone to the Museum of Natural History, and I've been reading all over the place. So I didn't really think of this interview. It sounds selfless, but I don't think of myself that much. I always think of external things much more. People talk about the inner life and deep inner feelings and the real person inside, and I have absolutely no sense of that. I really don't believe in the inner life; I don't think I have an inner life. I think my inner life is totally at one with my social life and, above all, my intellectual 112 life, and my life in the world. I never look into myself An awful thing to say, but I don't. SMITH: That's supposed to be a blessed state. NOCHLIN: Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. The only time I ever do, I suppose, is when 1 think I've hurt somebody's feelings. I look into myself to ask, "Why did I do that; why wasn't I paying attention? How did I fail to realize that this would be hurtful?" I'm usually very benign toward other people, but once in a great while I can really hurt people, and it's often unintentional. That's the only time I look into myself, to see what brought that about. I think we covered a great deal, and I'm trying to think in terms of work, or issues. I suppose one of the things I was thinking about was this book somebody sent me. Our Bodies, Ourselves as We Get Older. It comes out of a left-wing, feminist concern for the older woman and her body, and so on. I started looking at it with great sympathy, and then I realized I really did not like this book; in fact, it was putting me off". Partly because all the photographs and drawings are so ugly — fiill of these really ugly, cheerful, unselfconsciously dressed women. I found it so off-putting, that I could possibly be considered in this category. I felt like writing a letter about that, about the so-to-speak aesthetics and the ideology of age for women. For instance, in the suggestions: "volunteer work." Right back to square one, it seems to me, with a more liberal, leftist, feminist underpinning. Is this what getting 113 old is really about? Is this the ideal way to get old, to become a volunteer, to join a group, to wear hideous clothing, to not care about appearance, to be unworldly, to be a good citizen and a good person? I thought of this wonderful song by Carl Sandburg — he used to sing wonderful songs with a guitar when he was drunk — and it was called, "I Have Been a Good Boy." It goes, [sings] "I have been a good boy, and done what was expected, I shall live to an old age, loved but unrespected." [laughter] And it goes on and on about how he's had a good life, and he's going to be wicked as all hell when he gets old. Suddenly, that song came to me, and it seemed to me there should be more edge to old age, you know? A little more wickedness, a little more self-assertion, a little more eccentricity, a little more color and vividness, and, if not beauty, grotesquerie, and less wooly lambs and less volunteers and less goody- goodyness. I guess this whole book just turned me off completely. So I have been thinking about old age and its representation, and what is considered a good old age in our society, and I mostly find all the alternatives appalling except Carl Sandburg's. And yet, to tell the truth, I am enjoying these years of my life, except for being ill, of course. Even that is not as bad as I thought it would be. I'm not exactly enjoying the old age part, but I am enjoying my power, I am enjoying knowing what I am doing and who I am doing it for. I enjoy art more than I have ever enjoyed it. I am fascinated by music and dance as never before; I am totally given over to the realm of the aesthetic. Before, I had so many other things 114 pulling on me. I like being alone. I was very happily married both times, but I just love being alone; I think it's the greatest situation — with my cats, of course. But just the independence to do what you want, when you want to I see a concert in the newspaper and I just call up and get the ticket and go, all by myself. I love seeing other people, I have scads of friends. 1 am out almost every night of the week, either going to a party, or an opening, or a concert, or something, but I realize how much I like my independence. When you are older and when you have earned it and you know what you want to get out of it, I think it's terrific. So I have been thinking about age in general and what age can be or do, certainly. I guess I'm not that old that I really think about final things; that's going to be something else. But, so far, I've enjoyed all this, I like it. I feel closer to my adolescent years than ever before. SMITH: Well, that's nice, in a way. NOCHLIN: It is. I think it's true of a lot of people. SMITH: You had mentioned that you enjoy the power that you have and the position that you have achieved. I don't know if here at the Institute you are finding this the case, but at least for us at [the University of Michigan] there is this pressure to guide your graduate students on the trajectory of their career, and how they should shape it, and we're supposed to be doing this for junior faculty, too. I find this very puzzling, because how can you project more than a few years into the fijture? 115 NOCHLTN: I don't know. SMITH: I wonder, did you have a sense of where you wanted to arrive at? NOCHLIN: Me? When I was younger? SMITH: Yes, you, personally. Did you want power? NOCHLIN: No, I never thought of any of those things. All I thought of was the work That was what interested me, devoured me, set me off, it was the material: the art, the reading, the looking, the talking, the classes, the learning. That's what I wanted Of course, since I was going to graduate school while teaching at Vassar and while having a small child, I had to learn a lot of juggling. I had to learn how to organize my life so I could do it all. But even that I wasn't very systematic about, I just did it and let the chips fall where they would. I was nowhere near as organized as I am now. I didn't know anything about a trajectory; I had no sense of it. I just thought, "If I work, I'll get there. I want to be a professor and that's what I'm going to be." And since I started teaching art history before I ever had any graduate work in it, my end was pretty clear. I wanted to teach at Vassar, and I was teaching at Vassar, and I was going to graduate school so I could continue and progress on my way. But I paid no attention to tenure, which I got pretty fast. In those days, I guess people thought of it, but not in the way they do now. It wasn't a major thing at all. I think things were just different, things were more informal. For example, the 116 head of my department could call me up when I had had no graduate work in art history and say, "Do you want to come and teach in the department?" She didn't have to go through committees, she didn't have to go through deans, she didn't even have to make sure I had a master's in English. She just wanted me in the department and she got me, and that's how you got people. You called somebody somewhere or other and they came. So I think it was just a much more informal in-group situation. There was a smaller group of people, first of all, all of whom knew each other and had common interests and backgrounds. So you could manipulate things more on a personal level without rules and regulations and committees. SMITH: We've interviewed a number of women in the art history field, several of whom are a lot older than you, and a common motif that came up was, "I was just a working girl." NOCHLIN: What does that mean? SMITH: That they weren't anything special, they were glad to have a job and glad to be doing something they loved doing. NOCHLIN: No. I never felt that way in my life, I always felt special. I knew I was one of the most brilliant people at the Institute; there was never any question in my mind. Brilliance was always something applied to me. No, I never felt at all that I was just a working girl. I felt I was an exceptional person, and I was. And I think people realized it. They knew it right here at the Institute. There's a reason why 117 eleven people came to my orals, including the head of the Institute, people from the Met. People just wanted to see what I would be doing. I had my feelings of being unsure, and I used to turn green before exams because I had to do so well, but I knew 1 was exceptional. I never felt I was just anybody. SMITH: One of the things you mentioned last time that was very important for you was the master's-level course at Hunter College that you taught in the sixties, I guess. NOCHLIN: That was a wonderful experience. It was a great strain, because I was teaching full time. It was a three-hour course, and I came down from Poughkeepsie to do it, but it put me in contact with a whole other world of students. I taught a bit at Columbia, but that was roughly the same group. But here I was teaching painting students in the master's program, people who were studying with [David] Smith, and other really interesting artists, plus people getting their master's. A lot of the painting students were intensely ignorant of art history. For them, art started with Picasso, so it was really fiin to get them acquainted with earlier art, and they were absolutely mind-boggled by nineteenth-century art. We did the Pre-Raphaelites. They had never heard of them. They were doing minimalism, and suddenly we were doing [Sir Edward Coley] Bume-Jones and William Morris. They just were boggled. I taught a course called Flatness, which was a history of the idea that flat is good, which is certainly not an all time view at all — how flatness came in and the decorative arts and with the postimpressionists, so that they learned that what they 118 were being taught as the gospel of art was just something historically developed, like anything else. I had a class where I had all the painting students bring in their work so we could all talk about it as though it were art history. That was one of the most interesting things I've ever done, because it was a turning point: the feminist movement was coming in, pattern and decoration, though minimalism was still a god and the flat surface was still a god, all the things that had happened in the late sixties were beginning to have an impact on thinking about art, too, and the art establishment. The students were so open to new ideas and brought new ideas in themselves, and it was very exciting teaching students of that variety. And there were some just plain brilliant art historians in those classes, who have become my dear friends, like Hayden Herrera, for example, who works on Frida Kahlo. I found it a very exciting time to work. It was wonderful. SMITH: Did this then lead to the job at the CUNY graduate center? NOCHLIN: Eventually. That was something separate, actually. I think they knew about me, but I think Milton Brown came after me for that one. He wanted to build up the program in modern and make it into a really substantial program. He was the one who really went after me, maybe partly based on what he had heard about at Hunter, too. SMITH: It was you and him and Leo Steinberg? NOCHLIN: Leo was there before I was there, briefly. Ros Krauss was there. Bill 119 [William H] Gerdts had been there. Who else? Ricky Long, who is now there. But he got Ros and me, really, and, in a sense, that made up the core: Ros and me, and Bill doing the American. And there were people from all the other colleges of the city who came and gave their courses. But those were very exciting days, I must say, at CUNY; teaching at the graduate center was terrific. SMITH: Were the students there different from the ones here? NOCHLIN: Yes, I think they were, the ones I knew. There was an interesting mix. There were the Americanists, who were very traditional in their methodology. Oh, [Robert] Pincus-Witten of course was a guiding spirit there, too. Then there were more theoretical or more social-historical types, like me and Ros Krauss, and so on. So there was a division between the straight Americanists and the more theoretical and methodologically sophisticated people in other fields. But it was a very exciting time. There was Hal Foster, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Rosalyn Deutsche, Maud Lavin, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, who is teaching at Harvard now, Douglas Crimp. Our students are just all over the place. Who else'' Oh, Benjamin [H. D.] Buchloh went there. It was an amazing group, and there were lesser known people who were also extremely brilliant Then there were some not so good ones too, naturally, but it was an exciting time, it really was — a whole different way of looking at things. SMITH: CUNY now has an aura of being in crisis, and I guess it actually is in crisis. NOCHLIN: Well, it is, but I still think — Well, Carol Armstrong especially, I think, 120 is an absolutely brilliant art historian. (She left for Princeton.) I think they still attract some off-beat, interesting students, too, in modem and contemporary. SMITH: Why did you decide to leave there and come here? NOCHLFN: I didn't, I was asked. Yale wanted me, and at that point CUNY was falling apart Ros was going to leave, and if Ros was going to leave I didn't see any reason why I wanted to stick around there. There was so much infighting. The people out in the colleges wanted to make a whole program, competitive with the Institute and Columbia, and that seemed to me grotesque. We could never possibly match them with library material, or anything; it was a terrible idea, but those people wanted to teach at the graduate center, understandably. I could see this was going to be a political hell, and I just didn't want to spend my time in it. I got this offer from Yale, and I thought, "Well, this will be interesting, I can commute if I get a pied-a-terre there," so I took the offer. And it was nice, I loved Yale, it was great, except that it was in New Haven; that was its big drawback. But I liked teaching. I like working with graduate students. SMITH: Which is basically what you have done for the last twenty years now. NOCHLIN: Well, at Yale I taught undergraduates, too, but you have T.A.s and you don't really work together closely. I worked on final papers with them, but your closest relationships are with graduate students. I'm always very involved with my graduate students on a variety of levels: intellectual, social, aesthetic, etcetera. And 121 at CUNY, where some of the students are a little older than usual, I would be in reading groups with them. We read Lacan, we read Freud, we read Marx. I really learned along with them, as well as teaching them. I got to know a few of the graduate students at Yale quite well, and I still keep up with them. Yale is a wonderful place to work: the slide collection, the library, everything is very nice, but New Haven ... I don't know. I didn't stay there very long because this offer came, and my husband died, and to be a sixty-two-year-old widow in New Haven, thank you very much, I wasn't going to do. So I took this, which was absolutely a good move. I felt very bad, because they had made me a target of opportunity, and it was a unanimous vote, etcetera, etcetera. But I think people understood. I was not going to sacrifice my life. SMITH: How successful do you feel you and the group with which you are closest have been in establishing feminist art history as a quote unquote "legitimate" aspect of the discipline? NOCHLIN; Well, I think we've been amazingly successful, actually. What interests me is that there is not a feminist art history, but there are lots of different kinds of gender-based approaches to art history now, which are very much part of the curriculum, even in undergraduate work. Again, it depends on how it's applied. Sometimes it's very crude and very oversimplified, but so were former approaches, I'm not going to worry about that. I think it has been quite amazing what an impact it 122 has had, partly because the whole culture is so saturated with gender ideas and the gender problematic is all over the place; it's not just this field, and not just we who have done something. But I think, to put it mildly, the time was ripe, and you can see it in every aspect. In the real world, I think there has been enormous progress, but I think what's a little scary is that it is so class-based. It's upper class and upper middle class, and I read about some of the behavior patterns of lower class and certain ethnic groups, and it seems to me things have gotten even more brutal and more awful; women permit the most degrading situations, or are forced into them. I really don't know what can be done about that, and I think that's the larger issue. How are things for women in general, not just the public relations stuff, or gains for upper-class or middle-class women. Some people say there has been so little change, but I remember when my cousin, who was a little older than I, wanted to go to medical school, and she couldn't get in anywhere; there were no places for women. She had to go to Women's Medical College in Philadelphia; there was one place. Women lawyers? Forget it. Women teachers in most co-educational or men's schools? Not a thought. Co-ed meant co-ed student body; it didn't mean co-ed professorial staff. So I think in that sense there has been an absolutely immense change. I watch a lot of detective stuff on TV. There are women lawyers all the time, and it doesn't signify anything, that's 123 what's so interesting. It's not, "Oh, here's a woman lawyer." Everyone has a woman lawyer, and they can be good or bad or nothing at all. And women judges. Unheard ofin my youth. Even the notion of women artists. I'm so involved in this awful Artemisia thing, which I don't even want to think about, this movie. SMITH: Oh, the film. NOCHLIN: Oh, I get ten calls a day, and I haven't seen it, so I have no comment. What can I say? It sounds pretty dreadful, but that's the French. They can't believe that a woman is not devoured by the need to be admired by a man. I shouldn't talk, because I really haven't seen it. I'm not sure you can say the artist's lot has improved at all, but certainly in relation to men I think women artists, in general, have a much better deal now than they've had before. Though there were always exceptions, that's what's so interesting Joan Mitchell could be an important artist Maybe not as important as she should have been, but you had to be very tough to do that. There were good and respected women artists before, but I think as a group there's much more of a presence nowadays. I think a lot of our leading artists are women, like Mona Hantoum and Rachel Whiteread. SMITH; You are also part of a generation that turned to the social history of art, and just like feminist art history that has many different varieties and meanings, but I wonder, did you feel it was a struggle to get a social history of art perspective accepted within the discipline? 124 NOCHLIN: To some degree, but I think there were powerful figures working toward it, like Robert Herbert, who always was very strongly enmeshed in the social history of art. So that within the establishment there was always, it seems to me, a wing — Oliver Larkin — coming out of Marxism. There was Meyer Schapiro; you can't exactly say he's a social historian, but, yes, you can, in a certain sense. He certainly does the kind of social history that interests me, which is how the social element is represented through form rather than merely through iconography. What interests me is the total structure of the work of art and its position and its relation to the market— really a more totalizing view of the social elements in relation to art. I think that has developed; a lot of younger art historians have done interesting work in that area. I don't think it can be separated from certain gender issues, which I think always are social rather than simply psycho-sexual in some universalizing way. Again, it's all too easy to be oversimplifying about social history, what my friend Abigail calls the, "now, here's a pile of potatoes" school: let's show how the potatoes got into the art. [laughter] It's a difficult task to pull together the social and the formal, how the social is mediated through a language of form. It needs a lot of careful looking and attention to form. I think both feminism and the social history go wrong if they are not united with a precise sense of the object and formal analysis; they go off into oversimplified cause and effect arguments. "This man was a misogynist, so he painted ugly 125 women" — that's the simplest oversimplification. Or, "This man cared for the workers so he made heroic workers." These examples are both parodic in their overdoing of that, but 1 think you have to be very careful, especially when you are teaching, to make sure that you make the students aware of the complexity, the ambiguity, the multi-directionalness, and often the contradictions that come up. SMITH: I just read an essay by Mieke Bal, whose work you probably know, in which she says it was really feminism that put the issues of race, class, and gender on the table in art history. NOCHLIN: Yes, I think it did. I would certainly agree with her. Without feminism I don't think those issues would really have arisen. No, I agree. SMITH: This may be an unfair question, but I'll ask it anyway. In terms of your own work and your striving to unite a comprehensive social analysis with a really deep formal analysis into an intellectual structure that satisfies your philosophical training, what do you think has been the most successful? NOCHLIN: Well, it's a good question. I think my piece on Courbet in the Courbet catalog for the Brooklyn Museum, "On Courbet and the Real Allegory," a long two- part piece, is probably what I think of as my most successful attempt to unite all the various aspects of what interests me around a core of feminism. It's also, in a way, my most freewheeling and imaginative piece, too. SMITH: I notice that you have an article with that title in Representing Women. Is 126 that being reprinted? NOCHLIN: Yes. SMITH: Are you expanding it in any way? NOCHLIN: No, I never touch anything once it's finished, or rarely. And with a reason. First of all, it's so boring. I always want to go on to the next thing, I don't want to go back to the old thing. Or if I do, then I'll do it in a totally different context. But also I think once a piece is finished, it's finished. It's like revising a novel. It's a piece of writing, and when I write, I write with a sense of the form of the writing, and I don't really want to go back and destroy that. So that's just out of the catalog, but it's all one thing. It's in two parts, but it's one long essay rather than two parts. SMITH: An important part of your work, it seems to me, deals with issues of public culture in a democracy and how democratic art or education might be, and yet at the same time there's a realism on your part that these have been and continue to be things for relatively limited numbers of people. In terms of thinking about your place in public culture, who do you think you are speaking to, and what do you want to accomplish? NOCHLIN: I'm speaking basically to an educated, specialized audience, and I know that. That doesn't bother me, because there's a lot of . . . what would you call it . . . seep down, or — 127 SMITH: Trickle down. NOCHLIN: Trickle down . . . not seep, trickle down, yes. SMITH: Although seep down is a nicer metaphor. NOCHLIN: Well, yes, that's a little more like osmosis — it naturally falls. Yes, I am an intellectual, and I am a highly educated person, but I'm not difficult. I'm difficult to people who don't know anything about art at all, but I'm not obscure, and I don't think I'm hard to understand, if you make the effort. I can speak on other levels, too; I can speak to a sixth-grade class and make them interested on the sixth-grade level. I can speak to my grandchildren. I don't think that being an intellectual and working on a fairly high level means you can't talk differently to other groups of people. I know I always can appeal to a large number. They understand what I am getting at. When I spoke at the College Art Association and showed "Buy My Apples" and "Buy My Bananas," over a thousand people were there and they got the point. It was not esoteric or theoretically difficult. So I think I can reach out. I certainly don't make any attempt to put barriers up between myself and other people in my thinking, but when I want to be complicated or ironic, or stress ambiguity, or my own ambivalence, as I have in a recent article on Bonnard, which was really about my ambivalence, I don't want to hesitate because somebody wouldn't understand it; I never think of that. I know my limits in terms of audience, but I also know I can reach out. SMITH: Did you used to have, shall we say, more Utopian ideals about the role of 128 the intellectual? NOCHLIN: I suppose I did, yes. We always hoped we could change the world. When one is young, you think you can, and to a certain degree we did. A little world, not so big, but to change anything at all and feel that you are responsible is not such a bad thing, even if it isn't changing the entire socio-political structure. I think we have changed things, I think things are different, and it was through our efforts; I think that's a good thing. Sure, I was more Utopian. It's really kind of sad; we're living in basically a quote "apolitical" period. I think we've been bought and sold. There's no question. When I think about what's going on in the political world and the commodity world and the capitalist world and the economic world, I think this is a pretty chilling moment, in many ways. Pretty chilling. People are comfortable, they are buying stuff, they are doing their own thing, but something terrible is happening. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, there's not too much articulated complaint that anyone can hear. There should be. Everything is turning into production values, everything is turning into a realm of appearances. I'm happy, but it's not a happy moment, I think, in general It worries me. On the other hand, when I was growing up there was the Second World War, and we don't have that. And we don't have the same nuclear threat, although I must say, India doing these atom bomb tests is pretty terrible. And that we didn't realize it 129 is even more idiotic. But that's to be expected. But this is not a Utopian moment, it's not a political moment, and it's interesting to see how marginalized the truly political is in terms of social protest movements. I'm all for the seals, and I'm a big animal lover, and I work for that kind of stuff, and I support the arts, but movements for social justice? The attitude is: "We've done all that, so we don't have to think about it," but that's so untrue. Somebody once said, "If something isn't part of social practice, all you are doing is being eccentric, or having a party." If you want to be a totally independent woman and there is no social practice and no social institutions that allow for that, then you are going to be somebody like Elizabeth Anscombe, the famous British philosopher who wore a man's suit and smoked a cigar and walked along with her six children — she was also very Catholic. [Tape V, Side Two] NOCHLIN: Elizabeth Anscombe was thought of as a British eccentric; she was not thought of as being a powerful, feminist role model. People thought she was wonderflil but ridiculous. Would I do that? Of course I wouldn't have at that point. So the same thing is true for a certain level of political activism. If you do your one little thing, with a very small group, it's just marginalized by this vacuum that we're living in. Some younger people are going to have to figure out how to get real politics back into the arena. I think it is a worrisome moment, with the death of what I would think of as the truly political. 130 SMITH: Yes, or its transformation into something that is not of our generation's ken. NOCHLIN: No, not at all, not at all. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I feel there's something kind of sinister afoot. SMITH: Much of this was predicted by the Situationists and French critics, such as [Jean-Francois] Lyotard and [Jean] Baudrillard, who sometimes now look as they were glorifying rather than warning. NOCHLIN: Yes, and I worry about that because the French are so either/or, so absolute. They're so unwilling to see the exceptions and the contradictions and the pleasures of bad behavior, too. It's nice to go into a shopping mall for a while and buy things, and it's also condemnatory. But there's a lot of pleasure involved and there's a lot of pleasure being used to mask and veil other things and a lot of very low-level pleasure that's driving out other kinds of possibility, the lowest possible level of enjoyment, in a certain sense. So I think they were absolutely on target to a certain extent, but they never suggested what any alternatives or solutions were going to be. Again, it was this almost Hegelian notion, but the Situationists weren't so Hegelian. SMITH: Did you feel any appeal for what the Situationists were doing? NOCHLIN: Not back then, no. SMITH: They did have some influence on people like Rosalind Krauss and Eunice Lipton. 131 NOCHLIN: Maybe, marginally. SMITH: Is that a generational difference, do you think? NOCHLIN: I don't know. It's not exactly a class difference, but there are people who want to live well and you can't live well if you are interrupting the whole traffic system of Paris. I really mean that. I feel there's always an enormous contradiction between the writings of these theoreticians and the way of life that they enjoy and want to pursue and that we all want to pursue I think intellectuals are open to the same temptations as everyone else — maybe on a higher level. But I think Situationism was a Situationism of the mind for many people, and not of action, which is what it would have to be. I marched on the Pentagon and I marched for abortion rights; in fact, at one point I only knew Washington as a city I marched through, because I did so much of it. But to interrupt the entire social fabric because the entire social fabric is the "society of spectacle." Well, I'm not sure I was into that. I have a student who did the Situationist issue oi October, actually, Tom [Thomas F.] McDonough, and I'm very interested in what he's doing with urban history, because I am writing a book, part-time, called A Walk in the Park, which is my own history in terms of walking in various parks, and a history of my time in terms of movement. I always found the Situationist description of the urban experience totally compelling and totally true, in a way — true to one's own perspective on things. So that part of Situationism always appealed to me, but I am too warm-hearted and 132 too sociable and too much of an enjoyer of life and too lazy, [laughter] Let's put it that way. You know, I'm not harsh, except for very specific instances of justice. I have been privileged. I am not an outsider, I haven't been deprived, and there's no use pretending I have those feelings, I don't. SMITH: I'd like to ask you a little bit about several of your projects, the circumstances that led to your deciding to do them, and whether you got what you expected to get out of them. The first one is "Buy My Bananas," which at the time must have seemed an extraordinarily brazen act. NOCHLIN: Well, I was chairing this program on eroticism in the nineteenth century, which was part of a double session at the College Art Association. I was very interested in what was acceptable in terms of gender as far as metaphor was concerned. You might say formal language, rhetoric, was what really interested me, and these were the early, heady days of feminism. I think I talked to Louise Bourgeois about this, and I said, "Wouldn't it be fiin to have "Buy my sausages, buy my . . ." and either she or I said, "Oh no, bananas would be better," and we laughed. I really did want to deconstruct what was automatically acceptable about what is erotic, and for whom, and who owns the languages of eroticism: Are they neutral? Are they the same for men and women? Do men own that language and women have to chime in on it if they are going to have an erotic experience, or enjoy things erotically? What is the social mobility of certain figures and certain tropes? And 133 that's where I got interested in the breast/fruit image. You see, I don't think that most of these tropes are in any way transferable. Many people misunderstood that and said, "Oh, if only we could feel the same way about the male organ and bananas." But that wasn't my point; the point was to show how ludicrous it would be to even think such a thing, visually speaking. So I got a male model at Vassar, I got my tray, I bought the bananas, I asked him to pose, and he was wonderful! He just understood perfectly. I'm not a good photographer, I take little snaps, but I asked a friend who is a photographer, and she said, "You take one shot at the suggested f-stop, one at the f-stop below, and one at the f-stop above." That's what I did, and it came out magnificent. But it was partly because the model got the point. He even suggested those big heavy socks to go with the black stockings. If anything proved that you cannot switch these notions, that they are part of erotic ideology, as it were, that was it; it doesn't work in reversing the gender. I think that really made a splash. I don't know whether it taught anyone anything, but I think people started thinking. How could they not? It's so simple. You see, that's the point; it's not that it was something immensely complicated, but it put its finger on some visually demonstrable issue that you couldn't forget, once you had seen it, I think The same is true of "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" I think we talked about that, but I think that had some of the same vigor and immediacy 134 and complexity in that case. SMITH: It [the "Buy My Bananas" photo] really does seem to be widely reproduced. NOCHLIN: It is, it still is. God, if I had only copyrighted it I could probably have made a fortune. SMITH: Well, it was a donation to the public benefit. NOCHLIN: Yes, absolutely. But the model should have gotten something for it, too. SMITH: I wanted to ask you about your interest in the Paterson [Strike] pageant. That comes as you are announcing yourself as a feminist, or maybe just a little bit after, but it's part of that same moment. What were you hoping to accomplish with thaf^ NOCHLIN: Well, I got interested . . . that's an understatement. I got compelled or obsessed, or whatever those words are. I get into something and I really want to know all about it, and I want to recast it socially so it assumes a shape and a meaning. It's not just for the facts; it's because I have some compelling new interpretation. I think I got interested in the whole pageant movement because I found that John Reed, who had organized the [Paterson Strike] pageant later went on to do the march on the Winter Palace. I had also been reading the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan . . . whoo! I had a year's leave and I just read a lot of older feminist stuff. I read a lot of Natalie [Clifford] Barney, and I read Gertrude Stein. Of course John Reed was one 135 of Mabel Dodge Luhan's proteges, so to speak. But there was some particular reason why I was interested in Paterson. Partly I guess it was because it took place in Madison Square Garden. Here were anarchists taking over Madison Square Garden. I thought the whole pageant movement, as a movement, was of particular interest at that point because women had a lot of organizational power within it. The pageant movement was very much connected with immigration and the transformation of new immigrants into citizens through visual means and ritual gestures, and so on. It was a way of inculcating new citizens or would-be citizens with American history and American virtue. I became very interested in Percy MacKaye up at Harvard who was very influential in the pageant movement, and a lot of people in theater were interested in it, too. I didn't do any actual work on suffragette pageant material, but there's a lot to be done with that, I think. I was interested above all in this highly political pageant, and how it worked out and how it related to the work of Diego Rivera in teaching people the meaning of their own lives, as social and political beings; that's what a pageant did. It could be a kind of bland propaganda, or it could be something like the Paterson pageant, which really tried to reenact the social and political meaning of what that strike was about. SMITH: Were you planning on doing a book on the pageant? NOCHLIN; No. I only like articles. In the introduction to my new book I have a 136 whole section on why I like articles. It seems to me that so many books in art history are really articles, with a lot of stuff added on to them. You can pick out the good article. I just like getting to the nub of something. I'm a poet, I'm not a prose writer. I started in poetry, so I think in those terms. I think more synchronically. I like to get a totalizing integrated complex intellectual chunk, but I don't want to pull it out; I don't want to show its development, its evolution. I'm not sure things do develop and evolve in that way; I'd much rather zero in. I like what I did with that, that was fine. I wouldn't want to go on, it loses its intensity if you do that. SMITH: That article seems very much in place in the seventies as part of a larger intellectual interest, or a recovering of previous left history. NOCHLIN: Absolutely. SMITH: Which of course then in the eighties seems to drop out of the scene and there's a turn to an ideology critique of the Masters. NOCHLIN: It does, you think, in the eighties? SMITH: It's an overgeneralization. NOCHLIN: No, but I see just what you mean. People were marching, and so one was interested in previous marchers on the simplest level of explanation. Why are we marching, and what does it mean? But what I liked about it was the concreteness of it, too, that it was an historical event, with important political people in it. Several years afterward a group of us, led by Professor Patricia Mainardi, went to Paterson. 137 There's a little museum dedicated to the organizers of the strike, and a museum of the silkworks. The people there were not just ordinary factory workers; that's something that really needed to be stressed. They were the upper class of handworkers. These were self-educated Italian people, mainly northern Italian. Not peasants, or anything. A lot of them were very astute, they knew anarchism, and they knew politics. They were handicraft workers in a very highly skilled luxury trade Silk weaving is a very delicate and important kind of work. So that was a special thing. The eighties, yes, I guess there was sort of a turn more to individual figures, and I suppose theory began to get more and more implicated in what people were doing. SMITH: When you're working on something, or maybe before you actually plunge into the writing, do you talk about the subject with your friends? Is it something that builds in relationship to an everyday community? NOCHLIN; It depends. Sometimes it does. I always talk a bit with people, some times more than others. On the other hand, I don't like to talk it out. If you talk too much it vanishes, so I try not to do that. I've talked a lot to people about the horse topic. I have friends who show their papers to people and try to get criticism and feedback. I don't do that. I don't want that. The only person I ever showed everything to, as he did with me, was my husband. And that was very important for me, always. On the whole, sure, I talk about what I am working on and get feedback, but once I start writing I try to avoid too much interaction. 138 The only person that I really interact with a lot is my friend Tamar Garb, in England. It's flinny, we were both asked to do pieces for this Bonnard issue of the Tate magazine. And different though they were, it was as though we had talked about it together, and we purposely didn't because we didn't want to, but our viewpoints are so similar in some ways. SMITH: If you spent years talking about different things, probably Bonnard came up. NOCHLTN; Yes. Well, not Bonnard. It's just that we start from similar premises, so we come out with similar conclusions. SMITH: I was just wondering, take the Paterson pageant, for example If you mentioned it, and then someone said, "Oh yes, it would be really interesting to know more about that," would that be a turn-on for you to really jump into it, or would a response like that be irrelevant to you? NOCHLIN: Irrelevant. I am very self-motivated, as you probably can see. It's nice that somebody is interested, but it's irrelevant. If you think a lot of people care about the horse . . . well, some do, some don't, but . . . it's irrelevant. SMITH: Maybe they will. NOCHLIN: Well, it's a very primitive talk, I didn't have time to do too much with it, nor energy, unfortunately. But I just get interested in things, and whether other people are or not is irrelevant The Dreyfus affair was a very interesting case in point. I had never done anything on Jews or Jewishness or Jewish identity. I was asked to 139 do that by Norman Kleeblatt at the Jewish Museum, and once I got into it I did a lot of research about Dreyfus and the history of the period and anti-Semitism, apart from anything to do with art. The museum was very helpful in providing research assistance. Then I did lots of research on specifically Degas and [Ludovic] Halevy, and his various Jewish friends. I was interested in how people were going to take that article, and it was a smash hit with most people — though it raised a lot of questions. How do you think about an artist when he's an anti-Semite? Is it totally irrelevant? Partly relevant? If it doesn't appear in the work can you say that it's relevant? I think that raised a lot of issues that people had to call into question. Then Tamar and 1 edited The Jew in the Text, which got me interested, and I did a little piece for the Too Jewish show, just a little introduction. So, once I started going into the Jewish issue, it began to move into other kinds of territory. But people are always asking me, "Are you going to write a book about it?" About what? I'm not going to write about Jews in art, that's for sure. On Tuesday, Norman Kleeblatt is giving a lecture on the [Chaim] Soutine show, and I'm still reading the Soutine catalog. I'm commenting, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say about that. Orientalism was another issue, and all of these things come out of feminism, in a way, because that provides a certain paradigm, and you can of course vary the paradigm enormously. SMITH: Your approach comes out of feminism, but the topic — 140 NOCHLIN: Is from [Edward] Said, of course, directly from Said. But inspired because I was asked to lecture at an exhibition which was totally naive ideologically; you know, pictures of North Africa, basically, colorfiil pictures. Having read Said, I realized this was impossible, you couldn't look at it that way. I'm sure the people at whatever museum it was were utterly confounded by this person coming up and telling them this was all insulting, and so on. But I differentiated very much between Gerome and Delacroix, between good artists and bad artists, and what they did with it. SMITH: And you also differentiated between the subjects of the paintings: those who were disempowered and those who still maintained some power. NOCHLIN: Yes, exactly. SMITH: Which was quite refreshing to me. NOCHLIN: Yes, because, again, total generalizations always seem to be mistaken in some ways. It's never quite like that. I told you I did this long project on anthropological photographs of North Africa in the Royal Anthropological Society, the Budgett-Meakin Collection, which I have never been able to publish, but which I worked on and thought about a lot. And there too, either consciously or unconsciously, a certain nobility can seep through things that are not intended that way at all. I think these positions really have to be nuanced and differentiated to make any sense. 141 SMITH; What led you into writing about Seurat's Poseuses, as a subject? NOCHLIN: The Poseuses? I love Seurat, certainly. There must have been some reason. I can't remember. I had written about the Grande Jatte, and of course the Grande Jatte is on the side of the Poseuses. I was interested in the modem nude, certainly, and what could be considered the modem nude, and how Seurat could have arrived at that formulation. So it had to do with women's bodies and the nude. I am fascinated by Seurat, who T think is such a mysterious and interesting character. And the Poseuses was in the [Albert] Barnes Collection, so it was hard to get to see. But there probably was some major reason which I have blotted out right now. SMITH: I suppose what surprised me as I was reading it was the way in which you separated those Seurat paintings from the nude as it had developed in the nineteenth century. 1 hadn't been expecting that as the thrust of the argument. It did make sense, though. NOCHLIN: I think it is very different. Sure, it goes back to the three graces, but it's the difference between it and any classical projection of the nude that I think is interesting And the fact that he makes you work. He builds it up out of those dots, so it's not flesh; it never turns into some solid thing, it's always up for grabs. You have to work in visual terms; it's a change in visuality, in a sense, I think It's really about artifice; it's about what is reality. Is there a visual reality at all? Because he has them all dressed up in the picture. There they are taking it off in what is of course 142 another picture, but that's supposed to be the real world. I think the direction that Seurat takes is interesting. I wonder what would have happened to him if he had lived more than thirty-two years. That late Cirque is very bizarre. I think he's bizarre. What really interested me also were the black and whites, which entered into this, too. So I just got interested in that picture and in Seurat — and the body, the female body. Can you paint a female body which is relatively — always relatively, since nobody escapes from their time and their belief system — free from all that prurience and display and objectification? I think he did a pretty good job of it through wit and through undercutting and through visual activism. I think he did. SMITH: Do you think that escape, to the degree that it is there, was conscious, or are we talking about a political unconscious? NOCHLIN: Well, I think with Seurat it was more unconscious. Somebody asked him the price of his pictures, and he said, "I work by the hour. You can pay me by the hour." [laughter] He was very ambitious, I'm not saying that he wasn't. He wanted people to look up to him and respect him and all that, but he really was pulling toward the twentieth century, to a different way of thinking about bodies and modernity and putting the paint on, and systematization and all that, and I think that comes out in the picture So there's nothing like the cuddly nudes of Renoir; it's the opposite. They are very off-putting, and they have to be, visually, only because 143 tactility has nothing to do with it. You can't imagine touch playing any role there. They are out there not even as objects but as potential objects for the eye. The really sad thing is that in the Barnes Collection they are put above eye level, and they are absolutely calculated to be horizontal with your own eyes, absolutely, the whole picture. The whole idea gets totally ruined. SMITH; Did you tell them that? NOCHLIN: Yes, but they can't change anything. SMITH: Oh, yes, it's Mr. Barnes's will. Another thing I wanted to talk to you a little bit about was the associations you have developed in France and the position of an American art historian doing work on French art history, and the way you may go back and forth between Anglo-American conversations and Francophone conversations. NOCHLIN: Right. My closest friends there are actually American, or born in America. They are women artists. I am very close with them. Then the person I have the strongest ties with in the art world is Regis Michel, who I am very close to, at the Louvre. It's hard going back and forth. It's good in the sense that it shatters an easy frame of reference, because what French people think of is often very different. And the museum world there, on the whole, is so conservative, it's just incredible. Not that it isn't here, but I think there it's even more conservative. I am always amazed that the Louvre keeps inviting me over to give lectures, because I couldn't see 144 less eye to eye on a lot of things than I do with some of the conservators there. But they seem to liice me to come and give my spiel every so often. I was in the Corot symposium, and I go to Beaubourg, certainly, for Feminin/Masculin and have talked there before. I often go to the symposia at Beaubourg with a mixed group of French, British, and American people, and viewpoints are very different. Some of my contacts are through Ros Krauss and Denis Hollier, who is French in origin, and they have more permanent ties with Teri and Hubert Damisch. But it's often people who have had some contact with America, with the United States, which is a lot of young, or even middle-aged French curators, who've had a stage at Yale. The art world is not mainly in New York anymore. In a ftinny way I think it's London that's really where it's at in terms of new young artists and new movements. London is the hot city now, certainly not Paris, by a long shot. In terms of the nineteenth century, there are all these symposia, but most of those are international scholars, it's not Just French. Like the Gericault symposium, which Regis organized, which I thought was both a brilliant show and a brilliant symposium. Most of the things that 1 do on that level in Paris are international. I was friends with the head of Beaux Arts, Yves Michaud, and his wife, and they were the ones who got my books published in French, which was very nice. Very interesting people. Who else? Well, those are my major strands, but it's changing. I can't make generalizations, because I 145 think the separation between Americans and the French was much, much greater. When I was a young student I learned a lot from the Adhemars; they were very kind and very helpful. I had various friends in the museums. But, basically, it's French theory in other fields, like Roland Barthes; it's not art people. I very much admire [Jean-Claude] Lebensztejn, who I think is terrific, and [Georges] Didi- Huberman, certainly they have had an impact. SMITH: French feminist theory is very different from its American counterpart. NOCHLIN: Yes, but it was very important for me: [Julia] Kristeva, [Helene] Cixous, and some of the others. I really read them with great intensity at one point. I am not sure I bought into the entire package, but I think it was very important. Of course, Simone de Beauvoir was of major importance to me, that kind of thinking, absolutely. I was very much interested in what those women were writing about, and their much more theoretical, much more in some ways imaginative and less political take, 1 thought, was very interesting and important to my own thinking. SMITH: They were also more essentialist. NOCHLIN: In some ways, yes, in some ways, but it was an essentialism with a difference. They never said women were essentially meant to raise children or be good housewives. But they made something quite volatile and interesting about whatever that femininity might be. De Beauvoir certainly was not an essentialist; she was the opposite. 146 SMITH: But Cixous, and [Luce] Irigaray are. NOCHLIN: Yes, But essentialist with a difference, let's put it that way. I think we have to be wary of being too antiessentialist on the very highest levels. I think something is lost when that happens. SMITH: Do you have personal friends in the French feminist circles? NOCHLIN: I know Kristeva. No, not really. SMITH: Of course Kristeva lately has come under a lot of criticism. NOCHLIN: Well she really made an abrupt change. It was amazing. But the French — Well, she isn't French, she's what, Bulgarian? SMITH: Yes, Bulgarian. NOCHLIN: It's incredible to me. Right through the nineteenth century, people can make such violent changes: people who are far to the left go far to the right. Some people stick to their guns, but it amazes me. If you look at the trajectory, you can see it happening, but it still is amazing, that one should turn into a religious thinker after being so far on the left. But it's always in the head, you see; that's where it can happen easily. Whereas I am pretty much the way I started out. Boring but true. SMITH: I have a couple of short questions. One has to do with something that's very simple, but actually very important for anybody working in the academy, which is where to publish, and why. I am thinking more in terms of the articles. You have a large group of articles in Art in America, and a small but important selection in 147 October. Why those two journals for those particular articles? NOCHLTN: Friendship. In one word. Elizabeth Baker and I have known each other since we were Fulbrights in Paris. I love working with her, I think she's a superb editor. She has asked me to do interesting things. I like to be asked and I like people to suggest. Then I make them into what I am going to make them into. So that's why I work with her. I think it's a good venue, I think it's a good publication. I'm a good friend of Ros Krauss, so that's how my things get into October. And I'm interested in the kinds of things they do. SMITH: Though on the surface you don't seem like an Octobrist. NOCHLIN: No. But they can see the parts of my work that make sense as far as their concerns go. I do deconstruct, in very simpleminded terms of deconstruction. "The Origin Without an Original" is very much up their alley, and "Gericault, or the Absence of Women," again, was something they were interested in. SMITH; Did you write those articles with October in mind, or were they commissioned? NOCHLIN: No. I wrote the Gericault piece when they called me up from the Louvre, saying, "We sent you a letter a month ago." [Tape VI, Side One] SMITH: You were saying. NOCHLIN: So they said, "Come up with a title. We still want you to be in our 148 symposium, and we're going to publish the program." So I said, "Okay, 'Gericauh, or the Absence of Women,'" because that's what I thought of on the phone. So that's how I did that article. SMITH: And then you submitted it, or did Krauss — NOCHLIN: No, Rosalind asked me to publish it when she heard it. SMITH: Okay. NOCHLIN: And the same was true of "The Origin Without an Original." She heard it and she asked me to publish it. Fine. When people ask me, I publish. I've had things in The Art Bulletin and other places. SMITH: Is there a certain kind of article you would send to The Art Bulletin^ NOCHLIN: Yes, but I don't write that anymore, I don't think. 1 don't do that kind of conventional, scholarly article anymore, it bores me. It doesn't bore me to read it, though I think they've had a few boring articles. I would probably more likely send things to the Oxford Art Journal, where Tamar is an editor, or even Art History, I think. But that might change. I have written for Artforum, I always feel that's fun; I can say what I want to say. I like writing for the London Review of Books, that I have done recently, and I hope they'll ask me more because I like doing those very much. SMITH: Is that for friendship, or because you are the senior person in certain fields? NOCHLIN: They just called me up and asked me. I don't know them. I love the 149 London Review of Books. No, they just asked me and I said yes. SMITH: In terms of your books, what led you to certain publishers? NOCHLIN: Well, I wrote Realism for Penguin, and Nikos Stangos was involved in that, and I've been with him almost unfailingly ever since, because I adore him; he's one of my dearest, dearest friends. I think he's brilliant. I think he's the most wonderful editor, and I'm lucky to be with him. I think Thames and Hudson has been terrific. It's a commercial press, and I don't have to worry about getting pictures, they do all that stuff. But it's Nikos. He is just marvelous. He is just the best editor, and that counts for me. SMITH: And the collections of your essays that appeared in '88, '89? NOCHLIN: Yes, that I did with [Harper & Row], with Cass Canfield, Jr. Those were basically republications with introductions, and I worked with Nikos on one of those, too. SMITH: Did you propose those? NOCHLIN: No. I never propose anything. As far as I know I've never proposed anything; people ask me if I have something and they often ask me much too much, and I often try and do it. On the whole, they ask me, I don't ask them, and I never can even catch up with that. SMITH: The last time we talked, you mentioned the importance to you of just being with other women, and not necessarily for anything heavy intellectually but just to be 150 and to laugh and tease each other and have a good time. I wanted to explore that just a little bit more in terms of your life and the women who are part of that circle, and whether they are art historians or not. NOCHLIN: A lot of them are art historians. Women artists; I have close women artist friends. Especially in France. SMITH: And their names? NOCHLIN: Shirley Jaflfe and Zuka Mitelberg And writers. I am a good friend of Mary Gordon, the writer. And I know a lot of other writers too. Critics. But most of them are people who are doing something, yes, and a lot of them in my field. NOCHLIN: All of you very busy. SMITH: All of us busy, but not that busy. I just enjoy being with bright, interesting, lively, flinny women. It's my greatest pleasure. I just love it, I really do. I have a lot of gay men friends, too, who I feel equally close to and warm about and happy to be with. I really like other people. It sounds so banal! I'm funny — I mean, I'm very self-motivated and self-contained and independent, but I love my friends. Friendship is a very powerful motivation. I must say I love my family, too. We have a wonderful time together. The kids and grandchildren came down and we had a take- out dinner and a cake the day before Mother's Day. And it was also my younger daughter's birthday, and we laughed, and we just enjoyed being together, my kids and I; we truly like it. But it's very special to be with women friends, I think, and very 151 relaxing. Heterosexual men I have more trouble, though. There are some I adore. Of course they turn you on more; I mean, there's more edge, and you have to work a little, [laughter] They alv^ays make me feel like I have to work for my supper. SMITH: But you don't have to. NOCHLIN: No, of course, I'm only kidding, but it's some deep, inner, unconscious thing. Who knows what it is. I never feel quite the same sense of relaxation and enjoyment, I think. I have good male friends too, no question, no question. But I think sometimes they are competitive with me in a way that women aren't. I'm the competition, I'm not just a friend. SMITH: Are they competitive with each other as well? NOCHLIN: I think so, more. There's more of a sense of that. Look at big male curators. They want to be one up. I'd give some lecture, which was really pretty revolutionary, and one of them would come up and say, "Linda, your third slide was a little blue." And I'd think, "My god! Was that what he thought about?" And now I realize what kind of strategy is at work there, even if unconsciously. But then I'd get furious. Now I think, "Oh gee, it's so obvious." I think some heterosexual men feel threatened by the fact that I am a well-known, powerful feminist, and smart. They think that means I want to get at them, or I am trying to cut them down, and so on, and in truth, that's not how I am, and that's not how I behave at all. I'm not at all aggressive in that sense. As a person, I am socially very passive. I let other people 152 do a lot of the work. If people ask me to do something I'll do it, but I'm not an aggressive person as a personality at all. So men are very mistaken, in a way, about my attitudes toward them and how I behave toward them, but if you are a feminist I think that's how people often position you: "You're going to cut off my balls," or whatever it is. Or they are always on the defensive. Not younger men; I get on fine with younger men, about forty and under, and my graduate students — fabulous. It's older men that I have a problem with, the competition. SMITH: The circle that you are in of course is composed of people who are very prominent or relatively prominent in the public world, and to some degree you are also each other's subjects, just naturally, because you are all part of the world that you create for each other. NOCHLIN: Yes. SMITH: I wonder how you feel when you pick up Eunice Lipton's book, and you have this semiprominent role in it? NOCHLIN: And I have also posed for a lot of portraits and stuff like that. I don't know As I say, I am very unintrospective; it's embarrassing to say. I am a little surprised, but on the whole, I don't know how I feel about it. I don't feel that different from what I ever was or who I ever was. I suppose that's a trite thing to say, and I realize in some ways I am a public figure in a small circle, god knows. But I can 153 call up the Getty and get two tickets and a parking place for a friend of mine, just by calling up, and there it is. So I think, "How nice, I'm glad I can do this." I don't know what it means to be a public figure, exactly. I am a little wary of becoming a "grand old woman," or some fi^ozen effigy. Even the word "role model" gets me very uneasy. Because that means, first of all, that you are fixed; you are no longer a person in process and dynamic. You are stuffed and mounted under a glass case, and second of all, it means that all the darker parts, the conflict, the pain and the suffering, the difficulty, the struggle, the self-doubt, all somehow gets shoved under the rug, and it looks like you were always like that and it was easy. Or, yes, it was hard, but not hard the way it really was hard. All the mess, all the contingency, all that gets dropped, and you are reified. Is it worse to be a mind object than a sex object? I don't know. I think one should be sexual when you are being sexual. When I am having sex I want to be a sex object. When I'm thinking I want to be thinking. I just don't want to be reified, I don't want to be made into this finished thing, even if it's an admired thing. That doesn't suit me, really. I try to avoid it, and I can't. I'm still astounded when I go to a party and some young woman rushes up to me. Somebody fell on her knees once at a party and said, "I worship you!" I said, "Don't worship me in public. Make a private shrine." [laughter] You know, sometimes people are astounding, and I think, how did I do this? How could writing articles make people worship you? It just seems very strange. 154 SMITH: No, but that's telling, because you are certainly not the only feminist writing articles on art history. NOCHLIN: No, but people feel strongly about me, it's clear. And they tell me that they feel strongly about me. I can't imagine in my youth coming up to anyone — Well, I remember I wrote a poem for Loren Maclver, the painter, and I pressed it into her hands, so I guess I felt strongly about her. But not a scholar; I don't think I would have done that to a scholar. SMITH: Well, the nature of celebrity-dom has changed perhaps. NOCHLIN: Maybe, maybe, or people feel freer to be more expressive about it, I think. SMITH: Actually, that was going to be my last question, but I just looked at my notes and I saw that I missed something, which is a sort of technical thing. You were on the Harvard visiting committee for the fine arts department at a time which was notorious for its changeover, and this is one of the events that we've been tracking in a number of interviews, so I'd like to get your perspective on what happened at the fine arts department at Harvard. NOCHLIN: I was there before T. J. Clark was there. There was a lot of fighting about the public role of the Fogg Art Museum — what kind of public programs to have — between the traditionalists and the outreach people. There was a lot of hostility and ill-feeling among the warring groups. I was just amazed. I didn't know 155 anything about it. My uncle had gone to the Fogg, and I knew a lot of people who had gone there, but I never knew about the inner workings, and how much hatred, vitriol, and dissension was really going on there between what might be called the old guard and people who were trying to change things. But, as I say, it was before the T. J. Clark period. T was there earlier than that. The director was Danny Robbins. SMITH: Was this when Oleg Grabar was chair? NOCHLIN: 1 think he was, yes. I can't even be sure ... it was years ago. I think he might have been. SMITH: Were there particular issues that you had to deal with? NOCHLIN: Well, one was that German center. SMITH; Oh, yes, the Busch-Reisinger NOCHLIN: The status of the Busch-Reisinger. And there was a lot of hostile feeling, pro and con about that. But mainly I think it centered around the Fogg and the role of the Fogg in the community at the time when I was there. SMITH: And how object-oriented it was? NOCHLIN: Not just how object-oriented, but whether it should be opened up to the community. That was the point. And there was strong feeling that Danny had betrayed the Fogg. He was a good person, but there was just this sense that he wasn't protecting the specialness of the Fogg enough There must have been hidden agendas that I really didn't know anything about. I am sure, I am sure, because there were 156 such bad feelings, such vitriol. I never knew quite what it was all about, to tell you the truth. SMITH: Maybe in the spirit of your Musee d'Orsay article you could give us a sense of your ideal art history department, or your ideal academic situation. NOCHLTN: Well, I have it right here. Not exactly, but I like it here because everyone is very independent. I am totally out of synch with a lot of the people here as far as methodology and what we think is important and how we do art history, and all that, but what's nice about it is that we rub together fairly well for the most part; we leave each other somewhat alone. We maintain a kind of surface and actual friendliness. I would like to see more interdisciplinary stuff, though I'm not a heavy interdisciplinarian. I like to do the disciplines. But I have enjoyed enormously teaching with Richard Sennett; we just did this course in art and theater. We both happen to adore ballet, so this was perfect; we did Diaghilev. SMITH: How did that develop? Have you been friends for a while? NOCHLIN: Yes, we have been friends for a long time. This is the second course we have done together We did Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. We just love teaching together. Our approaches are very different. He's a sociologist. But I love working with him, and I am sure there are other people I would like to team teach with. But it has to be a very special relationship. It can't be just anyone. I'd like to see a little more back and forth, but I don't know. 157 In the modem field I think we are doing very nicely and I enjoy it. It's hard to say, because I teach all graduate students; once you have undergraduates, I think the stakes are very different, very different. You are really starting from basic kinds of things: a survey course. Do you have a survey course? What do you put in the survey course? What do you sacrifice if you don't have a survey course? How much weight should you put on history, how much on theory, how much on methodology? We are in an odd field because, in a funny way, there's the understanding that you are going to make people love what they are studying. That's not true in history. You can do a lot of good work on fascism, but, on the whole, you are not going to find too many people who are going to devote their lives to the academic painters of the nineteenth century, or the sub-academic painters. So in an ideal department some of these issues should be talked about: just what it is we're studying and how we're doing it. I'd like it to be all friends, very important, if I had my way. But I think it's good that it isn't like that; I think it's good that it isn't ideal and that it's haphazard and that it comes together through chance and then you make do with what comes out. I'm not sure ideal anythings ever work out like they're supposed to. I think it's better just to take the world a little bit as it comes and work with that. That's the one bit of wisdom I have acquired with age. I am not saying in all cases. There can be horrors; there can be people who are so abrasive and so antithetical and so oppressive that you can't work with them, and then that's really a terrible thing, and I know 158 situations like that. But, on the whole, if people can rub together, okay, I think that's fine. SMITH: Well, do you have anything you want to add at this point? NOCHLIN: No, my voice is disappearing, and I've got a lecture in Washington on Saturday. 159 INDEX Adato, Perry Miller, 99 Adorno, Theodor, 46 Alpers, Svetlana, 110 Althusser, Louis, 79, 101-102 Antal, Frederick, 45-46 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 130 Arendt, Hannah, 46 Armstrong, Carol, 120-121 Art Bulletin, 149 Artforum, 149 Asch, Sholem, 5 Atkinson, Ti Grace, 70 Auer, Bertha, 1 Bachelard, Gaston, 56 Baker, Elizabeth, 148 Bal, Mieke, 126 Banham, Reyner, 40 Barenblatt, Lloyd, 47 Barnes, Albert Collection, 142, 144 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 135 Barthes, Roland, 79, 146 Baudrillard, Jean, 131 Beck, Rosemarie, 62 Benjamin, Walter, 52 Beretta, Anne-Marie, 72 Bonnard, Pierre, 128, 139 Bourgeois, Louise, 108, 133 Brooklyn Museum of Art, 5, 7-8, 13 Brown, Milton, 109, 110, 119 Buber, Martin, 89 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., 120 Calder, Alexander, 22 Canfield, Cass, Jr., 150 Carnegie, Hattie, 69 Carrott, Richard, 50 Chenavard, Paul Marc Joseph, 58 Chicago, Judy, 103-104 City University of New York (CUNY), 85,94, 109-111, 119, 120-121 Cixous, Helene, 146 Claflin, Agnes Rindge, 22, 25, 30, 41-42,61,63 Clark, T.J., 57, 110, 155, 156 Close, Chuck, 61, 108 Cohen, Cora, 109 Coleman, Ornette, 16 College Art Association (CAA), 75, 92, 101, 128, 133 Columbia University, 75, 76, 86-87, 118, 121 Coolidge, John, 12 Cooper, Douglas, 60 Courbet, Gustave, 36, 43-44, 47, 57-58,79,99,126 Crimp, Douglas, 120 Cunningham, Merce, 16 Damisch, Hubert, 145 Damisch, Teri, 145 Daumier, Honore, 94-95 Davis, Chandler, 63 De Beauvoir, Simone, 46-47, 64, 146 Debs, Barbara Knowles, 44 Degas, Edgar, 140 Delacroix, Eugene, 94-95, 141 Derrida, Jacques, 79 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 120 Dewey, John, 29 Diaghilev, Sergei, 28, 157 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 146 Dougherty, Paulette, 49 160 D'Souza, Aruna, 45 Dufrenne, Mikel, 56 Eliot, T.S., 14 Estes, Richard, 61 Faunce, Sarah, 57 Feigen, Brenda, 97 Feigen, Richard, 97 Felman, Shoshana, 89 Ferry, Anne Davidson, 25 Fisher, Eileen, 71 Fogarty, Ann, 69-70 Fogg Art Museum, 155-156 Foster, Hal, 120 Foucault, Michel, 80 Frank, Mary, 109 Frankflirt School, 46 Franklin, Aretha, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 25-27, 68, 122 Friedan, Betty, 64 Friedlaender, Walter, 38-39 Garb, Tamar, 109, 139 Geertz, Clifford, 55 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 54, 124 George, Stefan, 39 Gerdts, William H., 120 Gericault, Theodore, 148, 149 Gide, Andre, 48 Giedion, Siegfried, 40 Goffman, Erving, 94 Goldwater, Robert, 37 Gordon, Mary, 151 Grabar, Oleg, 156 Graham, Martha, 15 Greco, Juliette, 15 Greenberg, Clement, 52 Halevy, Ludovic, 140 Hantoum, Mona, 1 24 Harris, Ann Sutherland, 107 Hartigan, Grace, 62 Hauser, Arnold, 45 Havelock, Christine, Mitchell, 46 Heller, Elka (mother), 5, 9-11, 12, 15, 17,22,43,81,92 Heller, Robert (uncle), 3-4, 12 Herbert, Robert, 43, 110, 125 Herrera, Hayden, 1 1 9 Hesse, Eva, 108 HoUier, Denis, 145 Holm, Hanya, 15-16 Humphrey, Doris, 15, 16 Hunter College, 1 18 Hyman, Isabelle Miller, 25, 35, 36, 50 Institute of Fine Arts, 23, 25, 32-33, 35-39, 50-51, 76,91, 121 Irigaray, Luce, 147 Jaflfe, Shirley, 151 Janson, H.W., 35-36, 42, 59 Joyce, James, 1, 10-11 Kahlo, Frida, 119 Katzenellenbogen, Adolf, 42 Klee, Paul, 39 Kleeblatt, Norman, 140 Kohler, Wolfgang, 26 Krauss, Rosalind, 55-56, 119, 120, 145, 148, 149 Krautheimer, Richard, 34, 39, 42 Krinsky, Carol Herselle, 36 Kris, Ernst, 44, 99 Kristeva, Julia, 146, 147 Kurz, Otto, 44, 99 Lacan, Jacques, 79, 122 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 120 161 Landowska, Wanda, 16 Langer, Susanne, 29 Larkin, Oliver, 125 Lavin, Maud, 120 Lawrence, D.H., 65, 105-106 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude, 146 Lee, Rensselaer, 53 Lehmann, Karl, 35, 37-38 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 55, 101 Limon, Jose, 16 Lipton, Eunice, 131, 153 Long, Ricky, 120 Lotz, Wolfgang, 34, 39, 42 Luhan, Mabel Dode, 135 Lyotard, Jean-Fran(?ois, 131 Ma, Yo-Yo, 29 Maclver, Loren, 155 MacKaye, Percy, 136 Mainardi, Patricia, 137 Malraux, Andre, 52 Manet, Edouard, 95 Mann, Thomas, 6-7 Mansfield, Katherine, 9 Marimekko, 71 Martin, Jean-Claude, 49 Marx, Karl, 47, 122, 125 McCardell, Claire, 69-70 McCarthy, Joseph (period), 63 McCarthy, Mary, 64, 66 McDonough, Thomas F., 132 Menninger, Karl, 27-28 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 56 Michaud, Yves, 145 Michel, Regis, 144, 145 Mill, John Stuart, 46 Mitchell, Joan, 62, 124 Mitelberg, Zuka, 1 5 1 Miyake, Issey, 71 Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 95 Montherlant, Henri de, 50 Morphet, Richard, 107 Morris, Mark, 29 Mothersill, Mary, 3 1 Murphy, Catherine, 109 Murray, Elizabeth, 108 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 75 Nin, Anais, 105 Nochlin, Philip (first husband), 23-24, 32,48, 51, 52, 53,63 Northup, Ann, 86 October, 148 Offner, Richard, 35 O'Keeffe, Georgia, 62, 105 Panofsky, Erwin, 39, 51 Parker, Rozsika, 100 Pearlstein, Philip, 33, 61 Pfaff, Judy, 109 Piaget, Jean, 56, 99 Picasso, Pablo, 12, 24, 44, 45, 56, 68, 94 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 120 Plath, Sylvia, 69 Pollock, Griselda, 100 Pommer, Daisy (daughter), 34, 64, 85 Pommer, Richard (second husband), 25, 31, 32, 33-34, 50-51, 57, 60, 63, 87,98-99, 110, 138 Reed, John, 135-136 Renoir, Jean, 95 Rice, Elmer, 14 Ricoeur, Paul, 56 Rivera, Diego, 136 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 50 Robbins, Danny, 156 Rodin, Auguste, 105 162 Rogers, Richard, 93 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 20 Rosenberg, Harold, 52 Rosenblum, Robert, 50 Rubin, William, 35 Said, Edward, 92, 141 Sandburg, Carl, 114 Sandler, Lucy Freeman, 36, 50 Sarraute, Nathalie, 49, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 58 Scaravaglione, Concetta, 61 Schapiro, Meyer, 35, 51, 58, 59, 125 Schlemmer, Oskar, 28 Seeger, Pete, 16 Sennett, Richard, 28, 157 Seurat, Georges, 142-144 Showalter, Elaine, 100 Situationism, 131-132 Sleigh, Sylvia, 61 Sloane, Joseph, 58-59 Smith, David, 118 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 96, 120, 125 Soseki, Natsume, 89 Soutine, Chaim, 140 Soyer, Raphael, 23 Stangos, Nikos, 150 Stein, Gertrude, 135 Steinberg, Leo, 1 19 Steinem, Gloria, 97 Stettheimer, Florine, 62 Stravinsky, Igor, 28 Taylor, Paul, 10 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 22 Thompson, Dorothy, 20 Trotta, Jessica Nochlin (daughter), 74 University of California (Berkeley), 110 Vass, Joan, 71 Vassar College, 17-23, 24-25, 31, 34-35,41-42,46, 51, 59-60, 61-62, 75, 76, 81, 84-86, 103-104, 116 Webb, Beatrice, 77 Weil, Simone, 46 Weinberg, Jules (father), 1, 2, 8-9, 17, 34,92 Whiteread, Rachel, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53 Wittkower, Rudolf, 5 1 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 46 Woodhull, Victoria, 106 Yale University, 121, 122 Yamamoto, Yohji, 72 163 ilfTTTTTmnm^^^HB^i 1